Home For Now, Home For A Lifetime (2018) is a work performed by Susie Elliott, Mark Richardson and Helen Mathwin in conjunction with Wide Open Road Art as part of Craft Victoria’s annual Craft Cubed event. It was a multi-stage, roving art event that explored tensions between ideals and reality of ‘home’, in a time in Australia when this symbol has perhaps never been so laden with fear and desire. Taking place in the Wide Open Road Art float around inner Melbourne, the work engaged in a public conversation and collaborative making process to produce a final installation in the Docklands.

Few things seem as fundamental or universal as the idea of ‘home’, and yet the reality of that for different people, at different times is worth exploring. Through conversations with the public and their own experiences the artists sought to evoke the lost homes that have been preserved in participants’ minds and which have deeply etched an idyllic sense of home. Passers-by were asked to discuss their ideas while at the same time physically forming clay and other artefacts to represent personal memories and perceptions. Stage two allowed the artists to represent their their engagement with the public, to ask where the archetypal sense of ‘home-for-a-lifetime’ fits within modern housing reality; densified, rapidly built and hyper-competitive? Building on previous work at Wide Open Road Art and with Craft Cubed 2017, this year’s project explores our individual archetypes and the struggle we undertake in trying to bring these to life against the backdrop of our current social experience.

For more information, contact helen@wideopenroadart.com