- Venue
- Newcastle University
- Location
- North East England
As you enter the space of Lauren Healey’s final year MFA exhibition, you are immediately confronted by a large grubby looking carpet spreading across the wall like a malignant tapestry. Its asymmetric form, has slithered ever-so-slightly over on to the space of the polished wooden floor, intoxicated with the shadow of life, its burdened and crumpled mass emits a history of its ownership. An image of the house can be built from this one item, you can decipher the outline of the bay window, the worn thread of the doorway eroded by the passage of its inhabitants, the dimpled ring of a plant pot, the heavy compression of the settee. Spotlessly clean flattened shapes of furniture juxtaposed against the heavy grain of life; grimy stains that tell of family rituals and childhood spills. The house is reduced to a flat, two-dimensional object. Alone in the gallery devoid of any utile functionality, it hangs there like a historical document, exposing/decomposing the lives of those before us.
A speaker stands in each corner, large and expensive looking, seeming like they will emit a powerful sound, however, at first one is unable to detect any evident sound from the speakers, other ambient noise interferes with its transmission. As I pause to listen, I am reminded of a lazy Sunday afternoon spent dozing in the chair, the afternoon sunlight trying to penetrate your eyelids, turning everything orange as you tune into the sounds that surround you, the muted echoes of a still house; the chug of the refrigerator, clicks, whirls, drips, nearby traffic, the wail of a siren in the distance. The subtlety of everyday existence.
Whilst the carpet and the recorded sounds may have originated from the same house, it is not about a specific house per se, there exists an everyday commonality about it. If we are shown a childish drawing or a symbol of a house, we are able to readily identify this as being a home, replete with our own ideas of comfort and homeliness. However, in this projection of our own memories and ideals, this is where the symbol of the house derails a little in its similarity, it becomes subject to our own interpretation, which is what Healey is most interested in exposing. The tangible space that once framed the carpet in its previous location of the Victorian house (as the title on the wall tells us), is now an empty space, its dissolved boundaries permeated by the silent sounds of a vacant house. Logic and memory flicker recognition, rebuilding its walls. It is a house that is not a house. A vestige of a space, full of holes, spaces of in-between that are left as the fallibility of the document unfolds.
