Leave Home Stay 2009

I did not expect to still own the house in 2009, and after a year of personal indecision amid general economic gloom, the third show came about out of signs and wonders. Most obvious was the appearance of a stray back cat which was brought to my door by three strangers over Christmas. It stayed for six months and inspired a series of works on the theme of transitional home. I called this third - and final - part of Leave Home Stay, Moving House.

I returned to the earlier theme of traces and marks, this time evidenced by such things as scratch marks, footprints. My family association was pared down to mantel piece equivalents - pieces of sea coal which evidenced the Kent coal field which brought my grandfather to Deal in the 1920s.

I turned the mantel piece into a mantel room installation, a space filled with objects following a loose narrative of Mary Anning's lost room The fossil finder from Dorset's Jurassic coast had a loose link with my childhood memory as I used to scour the coal field spoil heap, once visible from house, for fossils exposed by the dig for coal. The mantel room was viewed through thick plastic which had thinned in patches, and had small puncture marks, so that visitors had to make an effort to make sense of it. The room contents, unseasonably lit by Christmas tree lights, took on an uncanny quality, even in daylight.

Outside, as night fell, I projected images from the first year installations onto a sheet on the washing line. Outside the kitchen window I made a yin-yang symbol out of silvery cat litter and gold coloured bird seed. It eventually blurred as the seed was eaten over 10 days.

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