The Grammar of Home

You can picture a house. You can imagine its constituent parts and associated objects, the actions and routines carried out within its walls. A child can outline a shape that most would say is a house. 

But how do you show home? How do you use the right words, forms and shapes; a vocabulary that truly illustrates the meaning of home? How do you share the feeling of home? Is it possible to show our instinct of and yearning for home? 

The Grammar of Home seeks to negotiate these questions and hopes to propose answers to some of them. 

This body of work presents photographs of objects and places that collectively attempt to map out an idea of home; a concept that is universally held but is somewhat incommunicable and unique to each of us. As this work unfolded, a visual language of primary colours and rudimentary shapes came from somewhere deep within my psyche and I was reminded of forgotten moments, beloved toys and much-watched television programmes of my childhood. I have come to understand that these formative memories are enmeshed with my personal definition of home and I reenact and revisit them here through photography. 

So far, the work has been presented as an artist’s book. Mirroring the form and scale of the Ladybird series of children’s books, the twenty-six photographs in this edition are offered to be read as a collection of individual elements, a visual ABC of sorts, and also as a narrative whole. An open-ended reading is facilitated through the book’s concertina format and much like the idea of home, the reader is invited to make their own decisions on how to navigate and experience it.