Safe as Houses
IN HONOUR OF CLEANERS
Catharine Salmon
Media: Lego elements and toilet-roll inners
When Bill Bryson decided that ‘home’ was to be the subject for his next book he was assuming this topic would be ‘neatly bounded and cosily finite’. A book he could write in his slippers. But what he discovered to his surprise was that houses ‘are amazingly complex repositories.......that whatever happens in the world, whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over, eventually ends up one way or another in your house. Wars, famines, the industrial revolution, the Enlightenment, they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers... Houses are not refuges of history, they are where history ends up’.
Wars, famines and revolutions are all currently happening around the world yet seem unconnected to our everyday Pacific island existence. Not so with Covid 19. The impacts have had a fierce immediacy. Under lockdown, medical supplies, alcohol sanitisers and facemasks became a source of national and global tensions. Our houses, our home became both jail and sanctuary.
About
Catharine Salmon has an art practice centred on values-based installation, sculpture and painting. Exploring environmental, political and cultural questions and concerns, her work is diverse and relational. In her installation and sculptural practice Salmon works with a wide range of found and fabricated forms, light and text. Her underlying intent is to re-contextualise everyday objects/places and familiar art forms to engage, connect and provoke.
You can contact Catharine Salmon by email Catharine.Salmon@nmit.ac.nz