Make a Home in the River
'Open House'
New Estate Gallery, Melbourne
August 2017

Make a Home in the River
Negotiating art, materials and home

Make a Home in the River has been constructed from a personal collected archive of sourced images relating to home, housing, building materials and home furnishings.  These images have been collaged in relation to fragments of other personal photographs from old family albums and fragments of more recent images of my current home in Melbourne.
The idea of home has often felt problematic to me. What is home? There seems to be nothing permanent, enduring or reliable about it. All of the things that we associate with a home – structure, place, people or objects – inevitably shift.
Perhaps this is where the uncertainty of home is rooted, in the knowledge that the body is temporary, the world is temporary and the moments when we experience home are only fleeting.
I have always viewed collecting as a resistance to these uncertainties, an action that also connects to ideas of corporeality and death.
A number of years ago I began generating digital collages from images sourced online, generated through image searches based on word association games and poetry I had written.  Being someone who works predominantly in material and object-based sculpture and very often from the proposition of seeking to give material form to unseen or immaterial phenomena, these collages were a relief; I could collect and archive groupings of materials and make arrangements of objects without engaging with their physicality.
In a practice engaged with the strategies of re-using, re-purposing, re-arrangement and the re-configuration of things and objects, I very often find myself overwhelmed with the endless ‘materialness’ of the materials.
For some, or for some sometimes, the collection of matter can foster a type of groundedness in world, an earthing and a type of ‘home.’  Jane Bennet speaks of the logic of the hoarder in her lecture ‘Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter’ and how the horded collection is viewed as an extension of self, home and body, a position I can simultaneously relate to and yet seek to reject.  
Permanence and reliability are often not what they are cracked up to be but without some structure things can also become strange. Home often seems like an impossible place that I spend time running towards and time running away from.  All the while I’m pretty certain it doesn’t really exist, or rather, exists in multiple forms and moments.
These contradiction at hand - resistances to the in-flux flow of things in the real world and determination to engage with strategies of re-arrangement and impermanence in an art practice that predominantly utilises a material language - is a type of dialogue around the conundrum of home, impermanence and material.
In a sense I have always felt that through art making I can create a world that can be a home, and this world I can take anywhere.  
These two small digital collages are a reflection of my thoughts about home, collecting and materiality.

Text - Rebecca Delange 2017

Curated by Elvis Richardson and Beau Emmett
Digital collage, 8 x 10 inch