‘Home’ means something different to everyone. It is a site of production and consumption, social relations, emotions, learning, and play. It can be a source of warmth and protection, but also of conflict and fear. This display explores artists’ creative engagement with the domestic sphere, the ‘hearth and home’, and the complex forces that shape it.

The artworks displayed here dispute the often binary and gendered stereotypes associated with the home and its inhabitants. Far from being a passive, peripheral or isolated space, home has always been at the heart of artistic production, creative conversations, and society itself.

Artists such as Anna Barriball and Mabel Royds use the very fabric of the everyday to create their work, blurring the lines between domestic labour and creativity. Mona Hatoum confronts us by transforming a familiar and comforting object into something unsettling and threatening. For many artists, including Giorgio Morandi and Francesca Woodman, their domestic and creative worlds are intertwined, either by choice or necessity. As a result, themes of introspection and confinement are evoked.

Through these dialogues, the domestic emerges as a place complicated by cultural, economic, socio-political, and psychological realities. Because of this, it holds immense potential for radical creativity, transformation, and experimentation.

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