House, Home and the Domestic Symposium

Friday 22 October 2021 (9:20am-17:10pm)

The Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC) welcomes you to their first symposium, taking place virtually on Friday 22nd October 2021.

Symposium overview

Our ideas of and relationships with the home continue to evolve, particularly now in the era of COVID 19. This instability, and the range of experiences felt by diverse groups in different contexts provide significant challenges for theoreticians, researchers and arts practitioners seeking to understand the complexities of the contemporary experience of home, identity and belonging. Inevitably the internal reaches of the home are shaped by external, cultural and social norms, but now, with the heightened tensions about leaving the home, the increased complexity around how and when the home is used and its virtual visibility, the spaces of, and withdrawal into ‘home’ have gained new meanings. The negotiations within these spaces are also affected by relationships – past and present, expectations and hopes, migration and displacement, memory and loss, and age, personal, social and economic factors. As such, the home is far from being stable as either a personal or social framework.

Focusing on the home as an enclosed space with its surrounding parameters, this international symposium aims to encourage dialogues between different areas of expertise and highlight how these new meanings have been experienced within different countries. It is hoped that these conversations will help to extend understandings of this fundamental aspect of being human.

Opening remarks will begin at 9:20am, with closing remarks at the end of the event until 17:10pm.

An artist showcase will take place from 12:45-13:45pm, featuring work from Carole Griffiths, Paula Chambers, Elizabeth Harrison, Nina Vollenbroker and James Santer.

Please see full details of the event schedule below.

Full schedule

• Symposium schedule

  Time	Title
  9.20am - 9.30am	Welcome - Imogen Racz
  9.30am - 10.30am	Keynote presentation Professor Pat Kirkham, House, Home, the Domestic and the Creative: Charles and Ray Eames, 1941-1978
  10.30am - 11.30am	Session 1 Nina Vollenbröker: Unsettling Domesticity: Tracing the Challenges, Opportunities and Transgressions of Historic Mobile Homemaking Nick Lee: An Atomised Dwelling
  11.30am - 11.45am	Tea break
  11.45am - 12.45pm	Session 2 Adi Meyerovitch: The Photographic Depictions of Robert Rauschenberg’s Studio: Between preconceptions and changing realities Paolo Boccagni: As if it were Home: On the promise of home as a metaphor of and into social reality
  12.45pm - 1.45pm	Lunch and video showcase Artists: Carole Griffiths, Paula Chambers, Elizabeth Harrison, Nina Vollenbroker and James Santer
  1.45pm - 2.45pm	Session 3 Maria Luisa Coelho: Working from home: Portuguese women artists during Estado Novo Cassandra Joore-Short: Making Memory Material: Clutter and the home studios of Margaret Olley and Mirka Mora
  2.45pm - 3.45pm	Session 4 Graham Chorlton: Suburb Carole Griffiths: Art House: Home of discontent
  3.45pm - 4pm	Tea break
  4pm - 5pm	Session 5 Melissa Avdeeff: I’m bored in the House and I’m in the House Bored: TikTok and the mediated collective coping response to Covid-19 lockdown Gudrun Filipska: Proxmity and distance; new affinities and possibilities for artist's home and domestic cultures in a post-covid world: Developing positions of solidarity and kinship with mobile and displaced bodies through proxy and mediated encounters
  5pm - 5.10pm	Closing remarks - Imogen Racz

Panel details

• Keynote speaker - Professor Pat Kirkham

  Time: 09:30-10:30am

  Title: House, Home, Home Studio and the Creative Couple: Charles and Ray Eames 1941-1978

  Keynote Bio:

  Pat Kirkham is Professor of Design History, Kingston University, London. She has written widely on design, film and gender. Her many publications include A View from the Interior: Women, Feminism and Design (1989, ed. with Judy Attfield); Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (1995); The Gendered Object (1996, ed.); You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men and Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies, and Women (1993 and 1995, ed. with Janet Thumim); Women Designers in the USA 1900-2000: Diversity and Difference (2000, ed.); History of Design, Decorative Arts, Material Culture 1400-2000 (ed. with Susan Weber); Structures of Feeling: Women’s Experiences in Film and Television Production (2020, ed. with Vicky Ball and Laraine Porter). She is currently completing Charles and Ray Eames and Hollywood: Design, Film and Friendships (forthcoming).

• Panel 1

  Time: 10:30 - 11:30am

  Panel chair: Imogen Racz

  Panel speakers and talk titles:

  Nina Vollenbröker: Unsettling Domesticity: Tracing the Challenges, Opportunities and transgressions of historic mobile homemaking

  Nick Lee: An Atomised Dwelling

  Bios:

  Nina Vollenbröker is Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and editor at Architectural Research Quarterly. As exemplified in her monograph Home on the Range: Gender, Space and Belonging in the Nineteenth-century American West (forthcoming, Routledge), Nina’s work approaches spatial research with the aim of re-centring historic narratives and foregrounding excluded voices. Nina has received funding from The British Academy as well as from The Arts and Humanities Research Council, and presented her research internationally, including at Columbia University, Heidelberg University, The University of Notre Dame and Yale University. She balances her academic work with independent photographic practice.

  Nicholas Thomas Lee, Ph.D., Architect MAA is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Architecture and Design at the Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen. With an academic and professional background in both architecture and design Nicholas’s research interests occupy the fertile domain between these disciplines, with a particular focus on the domestic interior. Nicholas's research is concerned with In-between places within, thresholds between, and the spatial taxonomy of domestic landscapes. The Royal Danish Academy - Center for Interior Research provides a platform for Nicholas to undertake artistic investigations into prospective ‘Dwellscapes’ within a collaborative interdisciplinary environment that envelopes the anthropological, the historical, as well as the tectonic. As a core scholar on the STAY HOME project, Nicholas's post doctorial research project entitled, 'Dwelling in a Time of Social Distancing' examines the unprecedented demands that the Covid-19 flu pandemic has placed on the private home interior and its architectural arrangement. Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation STAY HOME is conducted by an interdisciplinary team from the Faculties of Theology and Humanities (University of Copenhagen), the Royal Danish Academy - Architecture, Design, Conservation and the IT University of Copenhagen.

• Panel 2

  Time: 11:45am - 12.45pm

  Panel chair: Patricia Phillippy

  Panel speakers and talk titles:

  Adi Meyerovitch: The Photographic Depictions of Robert Rauschenberg’s Studio: Between preconceptions and changing realities

  Paolo Boccagni: As if it were Home: On the promise of home as a metaphor of and into social reality

  Bios:

  Adi Meyerovitch is a Ph.D. student in the history and theory of architecture at the Yale School of Architecture. She studies the history of architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and her interests include architectural photography, historic building preservation, cross-cultural relations, and the infrastructure of imperialism. Adi was trained as an architect at Tel Aviv University and the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Before joining Yale, Adi had practiced architecture in San Francisco and had taught at the California College of Arts School of Architecture. Her “Kabri Aqueduct: a Neutralized Monument” was recently published on PLATFORM.

  Paolo Boccagni is Professor in Sociology (University of Trento) and Principal investigator of ERC HOMInG - the home-migration nexus. His research focuses on the lived experience of home, particularly among migrants and refugees. He has published extensively in the fields of migration, transnationalism, diversity and social welfare. Recent books include Migration and the search for home (Palgrave, 2017) and, coauthored, Thinking home on the move (Emerald, 2020).

• Panel 3

  Time: 13:45 - 14:45pm

  Panel chair: Pat Kirkham

  Panel speakers and talk titles:

  Maria Luisa Coelho: Working from home: Portuguese women artists during Estado Novo

  Cassandra Joore-Short: Making Memory Material: Clutter and the home studios of Margaret Olley and Mirka Mora

  Bios:

  Maria Luisa Coelho is a Portuguese lecturer and FCT post-doctoral fellow at the University of Oxford, where she is developing the project Portuguese Artists and Writers in Britain (1950-1986). I’m also involved in the project Women, Arts and Dictatorship: Portugal, Brazil and Portuguese-speaking African countries, at University of Minho. Her recent publications include a special issue of Portuguese Studies on transnational Portuguese women writers and the chapter “Transnational, palimpsestic journeys in the art of Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos”, in Transnational Portuguese Studies (2020). She is currently co-editing a volume on Portuguese writer Ana Luísa Amaral, and a chapter on artist Paula Rego and representations of aging women will be published later this year.

  Cassandra Joore-Short is an early career researcher in women’s visual and intellectual cultures. She is currently a residential tutor in art history and gender studies at St Hilda’s College at the University of Melbourne. Prior to this, Cassandra undertook graduate training at the University of Oxford as an Ertegun Scholar in the humanities. Her main research areas are women artists of the post-war period; feminist critique of art history and colour theory.

• Panel 4

  Time: 14:45 - 15:45pm

  Panel chair: Jill Journeaux

  Panel speakers and talk titles:

  Graham Chorlton: Suburb

  Carole Griffiths: Art House: Home of discontent

  Bios:

  Graham Chorlton is an associate professor in the School of Art Design, Coventry University, where he is course leader for MA Painting. His research interests centre around the possibilities of contemporary representational painting, particularly with reference to the imaging of urban spaces and places. As a painter he has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. His work has received a number of awards and prizes, and is represented in a number of private and public collections.

  Carole Griffiths is a practicing Sculptor and full-time lecturer at Bradford School of Art. She studied Sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art and completed an MA under Leeds Metropolitan University. Carole’s work has been exhibited in numerous places within the UK including Canterbury, London, Bradford, Halifax, Leeds, Sheffield, Derby and York. She is also a member of two collaborative groups The Unlocked Collective which focuses on responses to historical environments and archival content and a member of the Yorkshire Sculptors Group who focus on promoting their work through exhibitions related to contemporary issues. Carole is currently a research student at Coventry University undertaking a PhD in the Visual Arts based on Sculptural Representations of the Kitchen Utensil.

• Panel 5

  Time: 16:00am - 17.00pm

  Panel chair: Imogen Racz

  Panel speakers and talk titles:

  Melissa Avdeeff: I’m bored in the House and I’m in the House Bored: TikTok and the mediated collective coping response to Covid-19 lockdown.

  Gudrun Filipska: Proxmity and distance; new affinities and possibilities for artist's home and domestic cultures in a post-covid world: Developing positions of solidarity and kinship with mobile and displaced bodies through proxy and mediated encounters

  Bios:

  Melissa Avdeeff is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University. As a scholar of all things popular, her research is at the intersections of technology, posthumanism, sociability, and reception. She has published works on Beyoncé and celebrity self-representation on Instagram; Justin Bieber and the evolution of YouTube stardom; iPod culture and sociability; Kim Kardashian and postfeminism; and AI popular music.

  Gudrun Filipska is a writer, researcher and curator conducting Doctoral research at CEMORE (Centre for Mobilities Research) and Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Art UK under the Transnationalisms, mobilities and borders scholarship. She has published her writing widely and exhibited and curated globally on the subjects of feminist digitality, linguistic landscapes, cultural travel practices, post colonial geographies and cultural tourism. She runs a network called the Arts Territory Exchange which connects rural and remote territories through a large postal and digital network and produces research and writing into travel and residency cultures within indigenous territories and locations of environmental instability.

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