Comfort Zones by Matthew Richardson

com fort zones

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com fort zones

Darren Banks Paul Bush Maia Conran Katie Cuddon Anka Dabrowska Caitlin Heffernan Louise Hopkins Martin Kersels Nina Saunders Jennie Savage Ola Simonsson & Johannes Stj채rne Nilsson

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oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo oeoeoeoe ‘Home is so sad. It stays as it was left…’ (From ‘Home is so Sad’ by Philip Larkin, 1958) eoeoeoeo oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo One of my most enduring memories from childhood is of my first real home, where I grew up. Whenever I think of this home oeoeoeoe however, I do not dwell on my memories of living there; rather, I wonder how my home will feel when my family and I have eoeoeoeo gone – will it be sad, will it miss us? Will it miss me? How will it feel when it is all alone, and I am no longer there? And will oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo it remember me in the same way that I remember it? oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo The complexity of my relationship with my home is nothing new. In fact, the idea of home, domesticity, and all its facets, oeoeoeoe is something that has fascinated artists and writers for centuries. To try and capture a sense of the domestic space, perhaps eoeoeoeo as social construct, as private retreat, as recollection, nightmare, or utopian dream, can be particularly alluring and often oeoeoeoe reveal a very reassuring, familiar and personal journey. eoeoeoeo oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo In Comfort Zones twelve artists explore the concept of the home in close detail, and what this space, and the objects oeoeoeoe contained within it, can mean and reveal. The artworks, as you might expect, are at times, very individual and private, eoeoeoeo sometimes to the point of indulgence, yet when comparing memories of one’s own home with depictions of another’s, oeoeoeoe fascinating comparisons and delightful similarities are often revealed, accentuating bizarre intrigue and wondrous eoeoeoeo possibilities. Some of the artists in Comfort Zones lay bare their own homes, and some, the homes of other people. oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo Some investigate their relationship to a particular domestic space or object. In every work however, there is an exploration oeoeoeoe of real belonging, of deep personal attachment. eoeoeoeo oeoeoeoe While my parents still live in my first home, I do not, and I miss it very much. Each time I return there however, my relationship eoeoeoeo with its secret spaces and hidden histories is reawakened. I trust that it remembers me, and misses me too. oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo oeoeoeoe Emma Williams, Curator, Comfort Zones eoeoeoeo oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo oeoeoeoe eoeoeoeo oeoeoeoe

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Introduction

Comfort zones are something that most of us are familiar with – they often refer to the boundaries that mark out the way we live our lives, deliniating what we are comfortable with, what we can do, what we can deal with, what we enjoy and so on. Sometimes we talk of stepping out of our comfort zones. This may refer to trying something new or different, moving away from what we know, and are indeed, comfortable with. The boundaries of our comfort zones are malleable and sometimes unquantifiable, and change according to our personalities and individual situations. In short, our comfort zones are the metaphorical barometers by which we judge our lives, and they are both driven and defined by who we are as individuals.

This exhibition explores what might be termed as the boundaries of comfort in relation to what most of us might recognise as one of the more obvious and at first sight definable comfort zones, the domestic environment of the home. Our homes fill a variety of functions in our lives: they are places of relaxation, belonging, places to return to; and they often reflect the sort of people that we are, or even desire to be. Many of the works in the exhibition are concerned with very personal ways of thinking, seemingly particularly private to the individual artists who have made them. This thinking is a reflection of the idea entrenched within preconceptions and boundaries that define the comfort zone, particularly that concerning the home - that our own home is ours and no one else’s, and that it is a reflection of us and no-one else.

The notion of comfort is integral to our very personal relationship with our homes, and we strive to create our own places that reflect, describe and define us. This might be through, for example, our choice of decoration and fabrics, particular items of furniture, choice of objects, pictures on the walls, or books and CDs we have on display. We create a space within which we feel comfortable, almost an extension of ourselves. Within the home, there is almost always an identifiable, if smaller, more dedicated comfort zone that is even more specifically personal, whether it is a favourite chair in front of the fire, a warm, comfy bed, a radiator to lean against to read; or perhaps, it is merely just one room that makes us feel at ease, a bolt hole, a room away from others. No matter where it is, this place usually fills us with the sense of safety and security that we rely on to epitomise what our homes are like and what they are for.

For each of the comfort zones within the home, however, there are usually other areas or rooms that are less comfortable – ‘discomfort zones’, if you like. These might stereotypically include a creepy cellar, a spare, empty room or a drafty attic, but they are generally somewhere that instils in us a feeling of unease. This feeling might be associated with a particular object in a room, a sinister un-closeable wardrobe, a large, looming piece of furniture; but at times, there is something less tangible which troubles us – a sense or feeling that something is not quite as it should be. A simple movement, a shadow, area of darkness, or even a

particular smell can force us just beyond what we are happy with, and we are thrust out of our comfort zones, into a place or situation in which we might become anxious. This is not necessarily reflected by sheer fright or obvious alarm; often, our unease is more creeping and unsettling; a slipping from our own grasp of ourselves, and a lack of control.

These concerns, these feelings of discomfort, again appear very private and individual, and we might feel content that at least we know where the boundaries of our own comfort zones lie. However, the work in this exhibition reveal this to be an unreliable assumption. Secrets, dreams, feelings, memories and ideas begin to appear from within the works, and they are often curiously and sometimes unsettlingly familiar. We begin to recognise and identify ourselves within the domesticity explored - the rooms, the decoration, the objects, trinkets, toothbrushes, cushions, clothes, the ‘private’, secret spaces, the treasured objects, hidden or on show, the safe and secure bedrooms, family front rooms, warm kitchens smelling of good food, even the dark corners, the forgotten study, freezing bathroom, dusty backs of old book cases, gaps in floorboards, wobbly tables, ugly lampshades… We start to recognise ourselves, our own homes and objects, or ones very like them, and begin to recall our own memories, feelings and relationships connected with our homes - our own comfort zones under scrutiny.

The artists in Comfort Zones each explore different aspects of the home, its objects, and the way in which we use our domestic spaces, to bring attention to the different elements of the comfort, and the dis-comfort which can exist within this private and personal space. Darren Banks’ work Interiors focuses on the potential that rooms have within the domestic space to make us feel uncomfortable, and even frightened. Created by linking various scenes of home interiors taken from fifteen different horror films, including The

Shining and American Psycho , the work consists of footage of particular rooms, halls and corridors, and the shadows, hidden spaces and corners within them, in an attempt to suggest a very unsettling and sinister feeling. A number of the sections in the film have the camera panning round or across a room, or down a corridor, or towards a doorway. The suspense and the thrill evoked in the movement of the camera, as we follow its lens eye, create a continual rollercoaster ride of emotion, as we are taken towards the closet in Halloween , search the bedroom in Scream , cycle down the corridor and into hotel room 237 in The Shining . At each turn, we expect something awful to be lurking around the corner or behind the door; yet the horror never comes. Banks exploits our relationship with the conventions of the horror film, and by cutting out the actual action sequences and visible human presence, particular details and effects are emphasised through dramatic camera shots, lighting, and rousing emotive music. These simple but effective ploys change scenes of the everyday domestic space into a sinister world of terror and nightmares.

In Paul Bush’s film Furniture Poetry , various objects and items of furniture appear to develop their own lives, changing into many different variations of themselves over and over again. Tables, chairs, teapots, and cups (to name just a few of the objects used alter in appearance, suddenly growing or shrinking, changing colour, size and shape, in an apparently endless cycle. The changing objects are restricted though to variations of themselves; a chair, for instance, becoming a different but larger chair or a smaller similar one. It might change colour and fabric, but it remains a chair, seemingly constrained by its original single purpose and function.

There is a great deal of humour contained within the film, highlighted by the various texts that also appear, such as this extract by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape when no one is observing it and then when someone looks at it again, changes back? But one feels like saying - who is going to suppose such a thing’

By incorporating this text in particular, Bush opens up the home environment as somewhere in which the impossible becomes plausible, and we are able to see that the objects in our homes may have another life beyond the immediate one that (we think) we know – one which is infinitely more exciting and energetic. Maia Conran’s new installation 23 Bedrooms explores the very private space of the bedroom. Through a series of computer-generated maps, which outline the rough layout of each of her previous bedrooms, Conran recalls a specific memory associated with each space, and attaches it to the bottom of each image, like an alternative ‘key’ to a map. By attaching only one memory to each room presented, the memories seem more poignant and personal, and we are able to imagine and metaphorically experience the events and memories being described. The use of one memory alone also serves another purpose, which is to remind us how fragile and inexact the relationship between memory and place can be. Conran herself admits that many of the rooms depicted were probably, 2

in reality, nothing like the images which she recalls. Rather, it is the ‘localisation’ of the memory in a particular space, which makes each one so powerful. Katie Cuddon’s Mantelpiece Maps , reduce the home to the objects placed on the mantelpiece, a place traditionally used for displaying and defining one’s wealth and status. Produced while working as a babysitter, Cuddon’s computer-generated drawings faithfully record the objects placed on mantelpieces in various homes. Using the concept of a ‘map’, the contents are then translated into drawings in which only the outline of the objects, the mantelpiece itself and a numbered inventory is recorded. Cuddon plays with the conventions with which we often

analyse one another’s social, cultural and personal backgrounds. She juxtaposes the mantelpiece’s traditional, and enduring position as somewhere to display objects of personal or artistic significance, with the more modern role of the mantelpiece, as just another surface on which to leave things whether it is the TV remote, a screwdriver, a party invitation or a Teletubbies video - kept out of reach.

The role of the living room has changed, and there has been a distinct shift in focus away from the mantelpiece, and its central place within the home. This can arguably be attributed to the introduction of central heating and television, which have both led to the reorientation of the living room. But, in some cases, mantelpieces are being reinstated in the home, almost in an attempt to recapture the ‘homeliness’, and the sense of formality which has been removed. This is captured in some of Cuddon’s more idealised, even symmetrical, mantelpieces (featuring such staple items as candlesticks, vases, and vessels of pot-pourri), which despite being devoid of any objects which are particularly personal, express so much about the way we try to create a sense of home.

Anka Dabrowska’s crisp pencil drawings, and rough cardboard sculptures outline places, buildings and objects that the artist recalls from her childhood, growing up in the city of Warsaw, Poland. Distinctly urban in subject, Dabrowska’s works depict shops and high rise tenement blocks, sprawling and climbing into the empty skies. But rather than providing a full representation of each building or object, the simple line drawings are decorated with intricate and beautiful patterns, reminiscent of furnishing fabrics and wallpaper. The resulting contrast between the stark city images, and the delicate, ornamental patterns that imbue the work with a highly decorative, pretty, almost dream-like quality, create a peculiarly unsettling feeling, questioning our perspective on what exactly is being shown. Are these representations of real places, or are they more dream-like recollections of a city once called ‘home’?

In Caitlin Heffernan’s sculptural works, memory plays a crucial role, although it is the specific vulnerability and inexactness of the memory which informs her practice. In Re-assembling a Caravan, Heffernan presents objects of furniture, but not as whole, functioning things. Instead they are items which have been broken and then attempts have been made to piece them back together, to restore them back to what they once were. In each attempt however, Heffernan fails to repair completely the damage which she has inflicted on the objects, and the new creations, which are tenuously held together with small red vices, seem to hang in-between states, as creations which are reminiscent of things we recognise, and yet somehow removed from them at the same time – incomplete and mis-remembered.

Louise Hopkins takes the overlooked surface of the reverse of heavily patterned furnishing fabric and painstakingly transforms it into something which is intensely rich and almost exotic in style. Through meticulous paintings, her works entrance the viewer, seducing and drawing us in. Painting onto the back of these fabrics, Hopkins starts by mechanically reproducing the patterns which

are faintly visible, creating an interplay between the background (the fabric), and the foreground (the painting) of the work. However, Hopkins also embellishes the patterns, and new narratives emerge, playfully blending with existing ones, to the point where we are unable to decipher where the original fabric pattern ends, and a new narrative begins. In Martin Kersels’ video work Pink Constellation , there are distinct elements of the surreal. Drawing on theatrical, sculptural and cinematic references, the work seems to negate the boundaries of possibility, as characters (who include a teenage girl, a dog and Kersels himself) are seen to climb up and down the walls and ceiling of a small pink bedroom, apparently unaffected by the laws of gravity. The characters’ movements are made even more startling however by the fact that the other objects in the room appear to stay in their rightful positions, unmoved by the actions around them. This is not the case for long though, as, when the film develops, the furniture becomes ‘unstuck’, and starts to crash around the space in a menacing manner, almost ‘as if anxiety made it lose its grip’.

Nina Saunders exploits a self-indulgent desire often apparent in many of us to portray wealth and class through certain objects or items of furniture in the home. She then proceeds to undermine these aspirations, pulling apart any attempt at finding comfort or status. Her work features altered forms of objects that we are used to seeing in certain situations, certain homes, objects that command a certain ‘respect’ even, and might find appealing, such as antique patterned chairs and sofas, heavy in their reference to class and social context. The objects however are not what they seem, and turn out on closer inspection to be fiercely surreal and disturbing. In the most startling examples, Saunders acheives this through the addition of taxidermied animals and hunting trophies inserted into or suspended from the furniture. The result is very strange and unsettling, and at a far remove from the objects’ original state. Jennie Savage’s new work Out In The World – Domestic Flights examines the relationship between the private, intimate space of the home, and the wider, more public world. We are invited to explore the artist’s flat by navigating our way around a 3D computer-generated replica of it, and as we do so, hidden stories and histories are revealed to us, by clicking on the various objects and items of furniture seen on display. Savage is not only interested in the private and personal histories of objects in the home however, as she also considers the geographical connections which exist between objects and the wider world, whether that is through the importation of objects and items of furniture from abroad, the way in which things have been adapted over time to suit changing social requirements, or through the fact that many of our belongings have been created by workers in third world countries. This generates an interesting dynamic between the private space of the home and the outside world, and highlights

the idea that the ways in which we are connected to one another, and to our homes and the objects within them, is often more complex than we may imagine.

Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson are intrigued by the banal aspects of life, and their films often bring out hidden and unexpected narratives, which are inspired by the ordinariness and predictability of our day-to-day routines. Their short film Music

For One Apartment , explores the question of what happens in our homes when we are not there. However, rather than focussing on the objects in the home altering and moving themselves, as seen in Paul Bush’s work, in Simonsson and Nilsson’s piece, a gang of six renegade musicians are responsible for the extraordinary events and changes that occur. When we first see the musicians, they are sitting in a car examining what looks like the floor-plan of an apartment. This initially sets up a feeling of intrigue as we suspect that the gang might be planning to break into someone’s house and steal their belongings. However, when they enter the apartment, we see that they have keys, and rather than stealing things, the group begins to create musical noises and rhythms using the various objects and items of furniture which they find around them. The food processor, the television and even the toilet brush are turned into instruments: everyday practical objects given a new and unexpected lease of life. The behaviour of the actors in the film, coupled with their ability to bring out such engaging and unexpected qualities in the objects, makes us change the way we look at our own belongings, and potentially reconsider the life that they may have when we are not there.

Within Comfort Zones we are given private glimpses into the home. We are offered maps, shown memories and are presented with the histories of rooms and objects. We are invited to laugh at the possibilities which are contained within our homes, whether inspired by the potential for our objects to move and change, or just by the thought that something oddly surreal may (or may not) be occurring when we are not there, or not looking. At times we are also presented with more sinister perceptions of the ‘home’, and the objects contained within it. What is most striking about the exhibition however, is the way in which all the artists have been so inspired by the spaces and objects associated with ‘the home’, and the profound way that their works are then able to affect us in one way or another. We draw parallels and seek recognisable elements within them, and begin to wonder in turn about our own homes and the comfort zones they provide. The comfort zones we find in our homes are a reflection of our own more extended comfort zones, the ones that we operate within daily, outside the home as well as in. Yet how personal, reliable, safe and therefore comfortable are either of these zones? The more we look under new light, the more discomfort we begin to feel.

Footnotes: 1: Ludwig Wittgenstein, as quoted in Furniture Poetry (Paul Bush, dir., 1999, 5.15min) 2: Bachelard, Gaston, ‘The Poetics of Space’ (Jolas, M. trans.); (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press 1994), p. 8 3: From Martin Kersels’ notes on the drawings for the sculpture Tumble Room , 2001

Domestic Virtues: Art, Interiority and Domesticity Chris Townsend

Much of the history of modern art, and particularly that of modernism from the middle of the nineteenth century, is characterised by contempt for, even hostility towards what we might term ‘domesticity’. After the fundamental shift in the economy of art from patronage, whether by church or state, to the market, the emergent artistic social formation of the avant-garde seems implacably opposed to bourgeois values; that is, to the values of the comfortably off, home owning, upper-middle class, their homes crammed with the consumer products of the industrial age. As the industrial revolution extended more widely the notions of privacy and domestic space that had been granted to an elite in the Renaissance, so ideas of domesticity, and domestic objects themselves, became potent metaphors for political and aesthetic conservatism, sexual repression and intellectual complacence. Modernist architects such as Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier actively sought to destroy the sense of comfort or pleasure in the domestic space, almost wishing to make ‘machines for living in’ as the latter put it. Modernist painters constantly spurned notions of ‘decoration’ and ‘comfort’, insisting on ascetism and intense concentration on the subjects of art, rather than settling back into comfy furnishing, 1

and expecting art to soothe away the furrows of a day’s labour. What’s interesting about today’s artists is that, even as they often turn to the everyday as the material of their art, they share some of the same scepticism towards its domestic origins as their modernist forebears. However, they seem to have lost a contradictory sense, also found in modernism, of the home as refuge, and in its place found a way in which the local, domestic life may be intimately related to a wider notion of history.

My accusation of modernism’s contempt is, of course, a vast generalisation. Firstly, the resistance of avant-garde artists to bourgeois values often seems to last only as long as their marginality in the art-market. Secondly, there are a great many modernist painters who, if not exactly celebrating domesticity, nonetheless continue to use the interior and its objects as tropes for interior states. It’s notable how Picasso, who when penniless and living in the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre had painted his near-homeless, halfstarved bohemian figures in bars or the street, in his return to figuration during World War One showed the subject in opulent social spaces it could call its own. By then Picasso was, of course, enormously successful; bourgeois in income if not in outlook. Few artists of any era so fondly represented the insides of rooms as Sickert – though it is fair to say that this fondness is truly uncanny, in that the homely is somehow always pervaded by a sense of unease. And in Fernand Khnopff’s Listening to Schumann (1883) we have a picture that emphasises the interior of bourgeois, domestic space as metaphor for subjective ‘interiority’ as a young woman concentrates on classical music played by a friend or family member on a piano, rather than a recording on a gramophone. Under the pressure of modernity, with its emphases on speed, mediated spectacle and surface, the bourgeois living room becomes one of the few places where privacy may be practised, where concentration and attentiveness, as properties inherent to the subject, may be focused upon cultural objects rather than deployed at work in the service of capital and social processes that would render the subject merely useful, whether as producer or consumer.

The domestic interior then becomes a place of ‘resistance’ as it were to the effects of modernity that modernist artists so often feared. Charles Baudelaire may have been a poet of the streets, but as Walter Benjamin observes, in his prophetic diagnosis of the condition of the human subject in modernity, Baudelaire makes a distinction between forms of experience. 2 Benjamin understands these as what he calls Erlebnis - an isolated effect of shock, akin to the repeated ‘blows’ upon the exterior of body and consciousness that characterise the experience of the subject in modernity - and Erfahrung - where impression on the subject is given duration through its interiorising into consciousness. If the norm of Erlebnis is daily life in the modern street, or an evening at the movies, and has its grim hyperbole in the disabling effects of ‘shell-shock’, then Erfahrung, where the subject gains control over experience through interiorisation and reflection (through precisely those capacities for attention that Knopff depicts in Listening

to Schumann ) is a privileged condition of the bourgeois interior. The comfort and tranquillity of a certain form of domestic space are both a metaphor of, and a determining condition for, a subjective interiority that is increasingly under threat. Paradoxically, one situation that modernism artists seem to fear (the banal, staid domestic space) becomes a refuge from the overwhelming effects of modernity upon subjectivity that most modernists fear more than anything else.

The ambivalent, problematic relation between the interior and its representations was not always thus. Until the late medieval period there was no such thing as domesticity, there were few things that we might understand as personal, domestic objects. If the transition between late medieval and early modern cultures in Western Europe is marked by a shift in relations from indentured serfdom to wage-labour, by the emergence of a mercantile economy and institutions of credit finance, then one material sign of that economic transformation is the emergence of the private space, and with it the private individual. In medieval life, as Georges Duby observed, ‘any individual who attempted to remove himself from the close and omnipresent conviviality, to be alone, to construct his own private enclosure, to cultivate his garden, immediately became an object of either suspicion or admiration, regarded as either 3

a rebel or a hero and in either case considered ‘foreign’ - the antithesis of ‘private’. With the ‘invention’ of private space comes the ‘invention’ of subjectivity; one is not only given a space in which to be alone, that space of reflection fosters the individual act of meditation on the self that is eventually made public in the form of diaries, letters, or portraiture. The Renaissance painting does not only show us ‘individuals’, it most often shows us those subjects in spaces that define them, that make them; and the painting also then catalogues their possessions. The domestic interior, painted, is a display of objects that indicate social status, wealth, or certain moral and intellectual traits. The stacks of books that we see piled in those characteristic paintings of St. Jerome in his study are not only signs of scholarship – in an era when books were precious, hugely valuable objects, they would also be tokens of personal wealth, or a wealthy patron. And the parallel representation of actual, rather than symbolic, Renaissance scholars in their 4

studies, would draw attention in other ways not only to their intellectual virtue but to their social status. The convex mirror in which Jan van Eyck paints himself painting his subjects in The Arnolfini Betrothal (1434) is not simply a device that allows self-reflection on, and self-promotion of, artistic mastery. Along with other fittings in the room, and even the fruit on the windowsill, it demonstrates

to the viewer the wealth of the future husband at a time when glass mirrors were rare and expensive luxuries.

We no longer look so obviously to art for inventories of our prosperity, nor the representation of our possessions as indices of our moral worth – which is how the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century so often treated them. This is not to say that artists no longer make such work. Symbolic references to character abound in the work of the American photographer Nan Goldin, for example. In Comfort Zones the work of the young British artist Katie Cuddon is in the same vein, except that Cuddon does not photograph or paint. Rather she creates another sort of index, she maps. How many struggling artists have worked of an evening as a babysitter? Cuddon’s art here is a by-product of economic necessity; she traces the character and history of the strangers whose home she occupies through the objects carefully placed on mantelpieces as decoration, through the detritus of daily life in the home hurriedly placed on a ledge. In a consumer society perhaps we are no more than what we own, the sum of our possessions.

These objects, in their duration, are also a kind of history. We trace our lives in pieces of furniture, framed photographs and favourite CDs; in objects as much as in experiences. Acquisition is profoundly personal rather than utilitarian necessity. As Louise Hopkins shows us, our decorations and furnishings are marks of distinction. A bed, therefore, is not simply something to sleep in but an emotional investment with a new wife, who incidentally hates that sofa you bought with an old girlfriend about a decade ago and can’t afford to replace… These kinds of histories are Jennie Savage’s subject. Savage however works on the principle that the objects themselves have lives and identities; that they have their own tales to tell. So it is that a table will tell you a story of inheritance, of being passed through generations, and being modified by one of them. In an era when most domestic objects are replaced two or three times in our lives we forget the familial bond that can come from using even the most simple of things that belonged to our parents or relatives. Savage’s environment, with its objects waiting to disclose their stories, may be ‘new’ in the terms of its medium, but the artist follows an idea as old at least as the Dark Ages – the Anglo-Saxons would inscribe on precious objects (combs for example) the name of the thing – not its owner – and allow it, as it were, to speak of itself.

Anna Dabrowka’s careful drawings tell us something more about the home as history by placing the home in history, and in particular her history as a child growing up in Poland in the nineteen eighties. Fragments of interiority, the designs of wallpaper or fabric are confused with the angular brutality of state socialism’s fatally-compromised utopian architecture, and with the events of history, such as the imposition of martial law. In a country where history has largely ceased, supplanted by consumerism, it’s too easy to forget the marks of time on the home, to note in a street in London or Coventry where one house survived a bomb blast and another did not; to note the brickwork still lacerated by bullet holes from 1945 (as you still can in parts of Berlin, my home city); or maybe in a village like Aberfan to stand in the garden of a house and somehow see the now invisible line where the catastrophic landslide stopped and your parents – and maybe you – survived, where others did not. These are the sorts of things that homes can tell us;

they connect us as individuals, in our own local stories, back into the generality of history.

There is, of course, something rather disturbing about domestic objects having lives of their own – indeed we could accurately describe the notion as uncanny, involving as it does the reversal of the most homely of things into their direct opposite 5 The static becomes mobile, the inanimate animate. This mobility is the conceit at the heart of Paul Bush’s film work and is the underlying principle of Darren Banks’s ambiguous sculptural forms, as objects move around or change shape whenever we’re not looking. The idea of a secret life is also, literally, worked into Caitlin Heffernan’s art. Much of Heffernan’s work is concerned with the hell away from home of the holiday caravan – those flimsy seaside shelters where parents annually torture their children have been the subject of much reflection in recent British art, whether by Georgina Starr or, in her fascination with the beach hut, Tracey Emin. However, the half-hidden figure woven into fabric suggests more the buried secret in the domestic space, something akin to Henry James’ ghostly motif of ‘the figure in the carpet’. Here Heffernan brings us back into that modernist disposition of doubt about what really lurks behind the probity of the bourgeois domestic life, a concern that something is woven into the vary fabric of life that is best left hidden.

A similar anxiety is manifested in Martin Kersels’ video: on the one hand we have the safety of the teenager’s bedroom, on the other we have the trick cinematic staging of the revolving set, creating a displacement of body and space akin to that of some Hollywood horror movies. Indeed, we might say that Kersels here is transferring all of the concerns about suburban America in films such as

The Exorcist , Carrie or Poltergeist to the domain of art, via a knowing citation. The conventional wisdom of the horror film – especially in America – has been that evil lies outside the home, at the margins, waiting to break in. This terror is something lovingly mocked by Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, whose invaders are not serial killers, thieves or even the kind of ne’er do wells who might occupy your house and use it as a squat. All they want to do is explore the latent potential of your home – to use it in a way that you cannot imagine. But in Kersels’s imagination, as in Hollywood in the early seventies, horror is already in the home, the consequence of bad parenting or social breakdown; a displacement if you like of the older modernist conception of bourgeois repression and hypocrisy.

How then does contemporary art relate to the home? There have been vast historical transformations between the industrial modernity so feared by most modernists, even as they welcomed its revolutionary potential, and the present day. If we are not ‘post-modern’, we are certainly, in the west, post-industrial. Home is ever more emphasised as ‘ours’: home ownership is encouraged, and increasing; home is understood as investment as much as refuge, a different form of security. Yet art maintains a certain anxiety about the home. In part this is a mythic legacy of modernism, with its social construction of the artist as marginal figure, free from the weighty

trappings of domestic burdens like mortgages, furniture, and carpets. (This is, of course, itself a myth – few artists starve in garrets these days, most have mortgages, furniture, even carpets, and art is just another job in a ‘creative economy’. Marginality is more a state of mind.) There is another part, however, which is where art performs the task of distanced, symbolic commentary on culture. The artists in Comfort Zones, like generations before them, recognise the ambivalent status of the home, the problems buried in its brickwork, woven into its furnishings. Home is both somewhere safe and warm to come back to and somewhere you need to escape, if you are to make your own life. Home is where the cliché is, and therefore somewhere you have to leave in order to find your own voice. Home is both security and reminder of vulnerability: always remember that your place of safety is at risk if you do not keep up payments…

Footnotes: 1: For a wide-ranging discussion of modernism’s phobic suppression of domestic life, see Reed, C (ed.) ‘Not At Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture’ (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996) 2: Benjamin, W. ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (Jephcott, E. et al, trans.) in Eiland, H. & Jennings, M. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938-1940 (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) 3: Duby, G. ‘Solitude: Eleventh to Thirteenth Century’ in Duby, G. (ed.) (Goldhammer, A. trans.) ‘A History of Private Life, Volume 2: Revelations of the Medieval World’ (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 510. See in the same volume Braunstein, P. ‘Toward Intimacy: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’. 4: See Thornton, D. ‘The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 5: Freud, S. ‘The Uncanny’ in Penguin Freud Library, Volume 14 (London: Penguin Books, 1985)

Artists’ statements and images

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Darren Banks

I use drawing and video to expand my understanding of the language of sculpture. By approaching drawing and video in the same way that I would use a piece of string or an ironing board, I see myself creating a neutrality between objects and materials which plays with the viewers expectation and understanding of both artistic and domestic processes.

Domestic realities become cloaked with fantastical possibilities and objects chase their own dreams and aspirations. Drawn in by aesthetic devices, the viewer is led to question an objectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s function and possibility, but in each case this fruitless optimism is thwarted as the object constantly fails to achieve the miraculous; clothes horses fail to come to life hindered by their own limitations, advertisements act as if they are polished, horror films fail to climax, monsters are replaced with symbols of domestic responsibility and in all cases the focus of the viewer returns to the inanimate object, a cycle which often leads to an ambiguous and comical vantage point.

Right: Tea Shrine, mixed media, dimensions variable, 2005 Courtesy the artist and Workplace Gallery Overleaf: Stills from Interiors, DVD (10mins), dimensions variable, 2005 Courtesy the artist and Workplace Gallery

Paul Bush

Samuel Beckett, quoting Giambattista Vico, writes ‘Poetry was born of curiosity, daughter of ignorance. Poetry was the first operation of the human mind, and without it thought could not exist. Barbarians, incapable of analysis and abstraction, must use their fantasy to explain what their reason cannot comprehend. The figurative character of the oldest poetry must be regarded, not as sophisticated confectionary, but as evidence of a poverty stricken vocabulary and of a disability to achieve abstraction.

Furniture Poetry is neither abstract nor narrative. It is strongly figurative and without causal links. There is no allegory or myth. Metaphor is nascent and half-formed. The film is entirely literal and holds no secrets from the viewer. What one sees is the result of the coincidence of the material world in one of its most material forms with a mechanical device - the single frame operation of a camera. It is the result of the intersection of a machine and a series of common objects. It is a pure film in the sense of a language game being pure language, inexplicable in any other form, meaningless when translated into another language structure. It is presented like a lesson to the viewer with the objectivity and dispassion of a scientific experiment.

Beckett continues: ‘Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics, there is an inability to extract the general from the particular.’ There are no lessons to be learnt in this film, nor is there any element of the spiritual or transcendental. There is no transubstantiation here, only perhaps a slight transmigration of the soul of the object in which, for instance, a chair is reborn with plush upholstery and a pair of arms.

The process of the film is akin to alchemy, which, imbued with people’s dreams and aspirations, failed to turn base metal into gold and yet was the great grandparent of the industrial revolution. In this film, the film-maker turns away from the vast achievements in narrative and the illusionism of contemporary animation and reaches back to the distant ancestors of pixilation that should have lived, but never did, and finding none, tries to invent them. (from the original film treatment)

Furniture Poetry, DVD (5mins), dimensions variable, 1999

Maia Conran

Maia Conranâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 23 Bedrooms are pale and partial, yet like the computer that drew them they appear accurate and utterly modern. They are memories of places and times part forgotten, of no scale other than a recurring grounding in the size of the beds as an anchor to memory. On first acquaintance they seem architecturally accurate but they bare little resemblance to any perfect plan; they have a key but it is a poetic one, not mathematic. She fleshes out the bedroomsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; skeletal appearance with whatever most fills her mind when she thinks of them. Spurred into clarity by their form, come past happenings, some important, some banal, all fleeting. We find ourselves inevitably thinking of how many bedrooms we have inhabited, and what jolts their remembrance causes. We of the square-housed world recognise the form of these memories and with this recognition, these rooms become our rooms.

Estate Agents explores the value system that we place on our memories. A memory cannot be bartered for, but its attachment to place gets left behind when we move house. In losing the place we lose something from the memories attached to it. Conran explores that which is not mentioned in the estate agentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s transaction, but what you instinctively feel moving in; that a house is not only four walls and a roof, but a container of time spent.

Right: 23 bedrooms (details from installation) digital prints, 35 x 35cms each, 2007 Overleaf: Estate Agents (details from installation), digital prints, wire, perspex, 30 x 21cms each, 2007

Katie Cuddon

Mantelpiece Maps were produced while babysitting in the wealthy homes of one of Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most gentrified residential areas. They document, in a cerebral and objective way, the collection of objects, images and information displayed on the living room mantelpiece, offering a straightforward but paradoxical view of humanity.

The mantelpiece serves as a stage for domestic and social aspirations and yet ironically, it is also a space we tend to overlook. Its contents however offer us a carefully edited guide to a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s social, cultural and personal background; a guide that complies with our own rules for assessment and stereotyping.

Katie Cuddonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s practice incorporates a variety of forms and media. The work is often the result of wrestling with a highly subjective image or subject matter. The representation however is carefully mediated; the images are produced using a computer drawing program such as those used within architectural and technical design practices. The origins of the image or its references are there, flickering, but positioned at a distance just beyond our reach.

Mantelpiece Maps, inkjet prints, 30 x 40cms each, 2005

Anka Dabrowska

My work is autobiographical and combines ideas of memory and imagination in relation to my upbringing in Warsaw, Poland. Recent work investigates the structures and phenomena of a globalised, urban existence, and portrays the confined conditions of featureless blocks of flats in a rapidly expanding city. The drawings recall memories and places, depicting the council estate where I grew up and played as a child. My attention is focused on the easily overlooked, quirky or simple things that contribute towards our feelings of community and identity.

The work in this exhibition includes new pencil and watercolour drawings on paper and found paper bags, and a selection of new sculptural works, in which I translate drawings into 3D structures. The way I construct my 3D pieces is as if I were drawing. I take into consideration how things are put together and see the textures of various cardboards as marks, similar to those on paper. However, unlike the rough and gestural sculptures, my drawings on paper are more delicate and precise. I find the dialogue between the two very interesting.

All work Untitled, pen, pencil and watercolour on paper and paper bags and mixed media, dimensions variable, 2006 - 2007

Caitlin Heffernan

Many of my installations, embroidery pieces, drawings and photographs have been triggered by domestic objects, fabrics and family photographs that recall a previous time and moment. I am interested in memory, home, temporality and the real and imagined.

My current practice focuses on the use of domestic objects and inscribed images that are suggestive of longing, escape and melancholy. Landscape, place and home are experienced through objects and materials such as wallpaper, curtains and furniture coverings.

A central motif is my caravan. I began drawing my caravan where I used to go and stay as a child when I visited my grandparents in Cornwall. I found an old photo of my mum, sister and me in the caravan and I began to try and recreate and capture that moment. In trying to remember what it was like then and who I was, I found I couldn't fully put the pieces together or capture the essence of that time. I wanted my drawings, models and photographs of the caravan to convey the precariousness of such moments in memory and its failure and unreliability. The process of remembering is reflected in the re-making and reconstruction of objects.

Initially my work focused on furniture objects which for me brought back memories of the caravan and that time. The process of drawing parts of the objects and replacing table and stool legs and drawers with card and paper substitutions - also bandaging them together - conveys the precariousness and failure of memory. The use of clamps focuses on the process of DIY and my attempts to piece together the fragments of memory, of myself. One such piece is the footstool, where I stitched the outline of the caravan within the fabric. For me it was a way of tracing or trying to make real the memory and the moment.

Right: Untitled (Drawing of My Caravan), hand-stitched drawing into fabric of footstool, 33 x 53 x 37.5cms, 2004 Overleaf Left: Re-assembling a Caravan II (detail), screen, coloured thread, 207 x 150 x 217cms, 2007 Overleaf Right: Re-assembling a Caravan (detail), curtain, carpet, masking tape, clamps, bracket, two formica tables, chair, coloured thread, 166 x 82 x 3cms, 2004 - 2007

Louise Hopkins

Louise Hopkins is rarely known for making work on blank surfaces. Rather, she starts with a material that is pre-printed, be it with specific imagery or more generic graphic information. She works on furnishing fabric, sheet music, maps, comics, lined paper, graph paper, book pages and photographs. From this, Hopkins takes inspiration, developing appropriate painted or drawn gestures with which to engage with the surface.

Hopkinsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; work is often beautiful. It presents itself first and foremost as a sensuous, painterly practice, to be savoured slowly and appreciated for its skill and care. However the primary impulse behind the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s activity is rarely one of embellishment, but is more often harsh and disruptive, a drive to disorientate both the marks on the surface with which she starts, and the viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s response to them. In its consistent variety, hers is a practice which seeks to engage in order to interrupt, to slow down and divert the flow of information across surfaces, so that the familiar becomes less familiar and we can never again trust our response to the authenticity of the pre-existing mark.

Right: Aurora 13, oil paint on reverse of patterned furnishing fabric, 183 x 130 cm, 1995 - 96 Courtesy Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London Overleaf: Untitled (282) (details), oil paint on reverse of patterned furnishing fabric, 146 x 130 cm, 1999 Private collection

Martin Kersels

Martin Kersels’ film Pink Constellation presents us with a series of performances all staged within the confines of what appears to be an ordinary girl’s bedroom. The room however is built as a revolving ‘tumbling’ set, which is filmed as it turns by a fixed camera. Each stage within the film is a carefully choreographed performance, with a changing cast of characters in the room seemingly climbing, dancing across, and running up and down the walls, floor and ceiling. The film seeks to explore our acceptance of what usually takes place within a bedroom, and what might be possible in our wildest imaginations. On the one hand it encourages us to want the characters to be able to achieve their feats of counter-gravitational movement. On the other our suspension of belief is dashed to the ground, as Kersels makes sure he shows us the outer edges of the revolving structure itself, playing with our desires and imagination.

The film is a mix of sculpture, video, photography, sound and performance. The events within the room create a dramatic contrast between the safety and refuge we expect of a child’s bedroom, and the playful vortex of dislocation created by the structure, as our heads spin with the tumbling room and its characters and contents. As it draws to a close, the film verges on the sinister, creating a sense of personal loss of control. The objects and items of furniture come loose from their fixings, and tumble with, and after the final character in the spinning room, Kersels himself.

Pink Constellation, DVD (20 mins), dimensions variable, 2001 Courtesy of the artist and Deitch Projects, New York

Nina Saunders

Since the early nineties, Nina Saunders has conceived and produced works arising out of the subversion of the everyday object. Often made from upholstery and retrievd, used furniture, her sculptures and installations form a kind of trompe-l'oeil representation of domestic reality. Capable of being both amusing and disturbing in equal measure, her work shakes up our familiar and safe environment and looks beyond the classic virtues and feelings represented by the notion of ‘home’.

Saunders’ sculptures are apparently familiar and seemingly recognizable objects, gloriously seductive in their exquisite and skillful making. Yet they are unnerving also, as further exploration of them reveals unsettling and disturbing distortions of what we had thought and expected to see - a chair too narrow to sit on, or with a huge bulge in its back. In their altered states, these new forms heighten our senses,and call into question our acceptance and reliance on what should be, and what we feel we know of the familiar objects that surround us everyday.

In her latest sculptural pieces, Saunders has begun blending nature and domestic and social culture, bringing another disorientating aspect to her works. Taxidermied animals in the form of hunting trophies, a fox head, a hare, an antlered deer, are lodged within chair backs, under tables and other items of furniture. The addition of these unexpected hunted beasts poke further fun at, and add a sense of revulsion, to the objects would-be ‘natural’ environments - the ‘niceness’ of the carefully staged upper middle-class home.

Right: By-pass, victorian window seat,plastic, taxidermied hare, buckskin, tar fabric, upholsery materials, 90 x 135 x 40cm, 2007 Private collection. Courtesy Specta, Copenhagen Overleaf Left: Refuge, (detail), Sanderson fabric, fox mask, upholstery materials, 60 x 88 x 107cm, 2006 Private collection Overleaf Right L: Heartbreak, 2 chairs, faux leather, upholstery materials, 98 x 65 x 77cm, 2007 Private collection. Courtesy Specta, Copenhagen Overleaf Right R: It is about your request to be let out of the forest, mounted stuffed deer's head in balaclava (White tailed deer from Kentucky USA), 50 x 24 x 38cm, 2005 Courtesy New Art Centre, Roche Court

Jennie Savage

Working through a process that uses archiving and intervention, I seek to map the other life of a place in order to reveal a multi-faceted, complex situation or micro-structure. Using the tradition of story telling and the processes of documentary, historical research methods, psycho-geography and imagined other lives, the work adopts a phenomenalogical approach to making sense of place, raising questions above and beyond a topographical layer. Through this process micro situations become important and have a relevance beyond their locality.

Out In The World : Domestic Flights is part of a series of text based multimedia projects which seek to deconstruct place in relation to time using narrative. Domestic Flights takes my flat, my belongings, as a starting point through which to explore memory, personal stories, family histories and global networks of trade and information. During this exploration of my flat I discovered the world was present in amongst my stuff and that I am connected to history and the rest of the world by invisible, anecdotal threads.

Out In The World : Domestic Flights, CD Rom, dimensions variable, 2006

Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson A gang in a Volvo have staked out an apartment; when its occupants leave to walk their dog, the six break into the place. One keeps his eyes on a stopwatch: they have only ten minutes before the couple return. Instead of stealing things, the gang goes from room to room making fascinating percussive music with found objects: first in the kitchen, then the bedroom, the bathroom, and finally the living room. Cabinet doors, pot lids, light switches, a pill dispenser, lamps, books, and a vacuum cleaner hose all add to the suite in four movements. The drummers keep the first three rooms tidy, returning each of the objects they use to their original resting place. But what will the flat's occupants make of the hurricane that hits the living room?

In Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson’s work, the surreal is never far away. Their films are resplendent with black humour, and marked by the large dose of stylisation and unparalleled precision with which they are made. Set in Sweden, their films often display a rather atypical image of the country, replete with appropriated offices and people involved in ridiculous, repetitive activities. The two filmmakers take to task the grotesqueness of bureaucracy, the absurdity of the modern world, and the mechanical nature of our modern-day lives.

Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson have been producing films together since 1990. They have worked on a number of short films, both scripted and documentary, and have received international critical acclaim for many of their works. Music for One Apartment and Six

Drummers is perhaps their best known work to date. It has been screened at dozens of international film festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival 2001 and has received over 30 international awards.

Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers, DVD, dimensions variable, 2001

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Darren Banks

Born in Orsett, Essex in 1978. Lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne Education 2005 University of Newcastle upon Tyne, M.F.A 2002 University of Newcastle upon Tyne, B.A (Hons) Solo Exhibitions 2007 High Bridge, High Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne 2006 Sci-fi looking thing, Workplace Gallery, Gateshead Selected Group Exhibitions 2007 Art Futures, Bloomberg Space, London The Opposite of Vertigo, The Drawing Room, London 2006 Electrical Activity, Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne Formal Dining, Hales Gallery, London blue star red wedge, Glasgow International Pulse Art Fair New York, NY The space in-between the sole and the heel, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh 2005 Zoo Art fair, London Picnic on a Roundabout, University of Newcastle upon Tyne Darren Banks and Mattias Härenstam, Workplace Gallery, Gateshead The space in-between the sole and the heel, Globe Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne 2004 Windows wide open, Side cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne Practice, Newcastle upon Tyne 2003 show 2, starboard home, Newcastle upon Tyne Novotel Rooms, Magnifitat, Edinburgh Awards 2003 European Social Fund Bursary 2002 The Hatton Gallery Student Prize

Paul Bush

Born in London in 1956. Lives and works in London Education 1978 Central School and Goldsmiths College, London Filmography 2006 Central Swiss, 8 min Paul Bush Talks, 2 min 2004 Shinjuku Samurai, 6 min While Darwin Sleeps, 5 min 2003 Geisha Grooming, 3.30 min 2002 Secret Love, 3.30 min Busby Berkeley’s Tribute To Mae West, 1.20 min 2001 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,5.15 min Pas De Deux De Deux, 5.30 min Lie Detector, 1.20 min 2000 Flik-Flak, 2 episodes of 3 min 1999 Furniture Poetry, 5.15 min 1998 The Albatross, 15 min 1996 The Rumour of True Things, 26 min 1995 Still Life With Small Cup, 3.30 min 1994 His Comedy, 8 min 1991 Lake Of Dreams, 13 min 1990 Forgetting, 34 min; Lost Images, 1 min 1987 So Many, So Magnificent, 44 min 1984 The Cow’s Drama, 38 min Awards 2005 Best Animation - L’Alternativa, Barcelona 2nd Prize: 2005 Media Forum, Moscow International Film Festival 2003 NESTA fellowship Il Coreografo Elettronico: Independent Section, Napolidanza, Naples, Italy 2002 Anyzone Award: Holland Animation Festival Best Experimental Film: FilmVideo, Montecatini, Italy Micromovie award: Tampere Film Festival, Finland 2001 Best Commercial: Cinanima 2001, Portugal Best Animation: 2001 ACC (Japan Television Commercial Confederation award) 2000 Gold Conch: Mumbai International Film Festival Grand Prix: Transmediale 2000, Berlin

1998 Alves Costa Award: Cinanima 98, Portugal Best Film: Cinanima 98, Portugal Special Jury Prize: Hiroshima International Animation Festival Best Film: Zagreb International Animation Festival 1996 Special Recognition Award: Zagreb International Animation Festival Grand Prix: Bonn Videonale Silver Conch: Bombay International Film Festival Public Collections Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Kunstmuseum, Bonn Hiroshima Cinematographic and Audio Visual Library ZKM, Karlsruhe Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona OVNI, Barcelona Magnetoscopio, Rio de Janeiro Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Spain Sienna Library, York, Pennsylvania Cinema Nova, Brussels Cinemedia, Melbourne, Australia Cite des Sciences and de l’Industrie Mediatheque, Paris NRW Forum, Dusseldorf

Maia Conran

Anka Dabrowska

Born in Bangor, Gwynedd in 1977. Lives and works in Bethesda, Gwynedd

Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1979. Lives and works in London

Education 2004 Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, B.A (Hons)

Education 2003 University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, M.A 2001 University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, B.A (Hons)

Selected Group Exhibitions 2006 Tylla 2, Galeri, Caernarfon 2005 Llechi, National Eisteddfod of Wales, Bangor 2004 33 Steps In The Mile, Mile End Gallery, London Peak Rapport, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield 2003 Something Communicated, Sheffied Hallam University, Sheffield Awards 2004 Equal Opportunities Prize, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield

Katie Cuddon

Born in London in 1979. Lives and works in London Education 2006 Royal College of Art, M.A 2004 Glasgow School of Art, MPhil 2002 Glasgow School of Art, B.A (Hons) Selected Group Exhibitions 2006 Drawing Breath, The Gallery, Wimbledon College of Art, London Telelust, Kunsthalle Lophem/Centre for Contemporary Art, Belgium Generation, Royal College of Art, London 2005 Jerwood Drawing Prize 2005, Jerwood Space, London. Touring to: Pittville Gallery, Cheltenham; Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow; Bayart, Cardiff; The Study Gallery, Poole 2005 See you at Home, Grove Lane, London Hidden Things, Hackney Empire, London Mann Group Drawing Prize, Royal College of Art, London 2004 RIAS (Royal Institute of Architects in Scotland), Edinburgh The Lighthouse Gallery, Glasgow 2003 Smalls, Atrium Gallery. Glasgow Awards 2005 Jerwood Drawing Prize (2nd prize) 2002 The Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award

Solo Exhibitions 2005 Hometown, Seven Seven Contemporary Art Gallery, London 2002 Little House Furnished with Big Dreams, Seven Seven Contemporary Art Gallery, London Selected Group Exhibitions 2006 No-ship, Seven Seven Contemporary Art Gallery, London Soup, Cafe Van Gogh, London A Place Called Home, Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland Defence, Feist Space, London they also draw, Seven Seven Contemporary Art Gallery, London The Spring Drawing Show, Ashcroft Modern Art, Cirencester Continental Breakfast, Maribor Art Gallery, Maribor, Slovenia 2005 Jerwood Drawing Prize, Jerwood Space, London. Touring to: Pittville Gallery, Cheltenham; Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow; Bayart, Cardiff; The Study Gallery, Poole Red October, Seven Seven Contemporary Art Gallery, London Sketch, Open Drawing Prize, Rabley Contemporary Drawing Centre, Mildenhall, Marlborough, Wiltshire 2004 Anka Dabrowska & Jeni Snell - Places Home, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead Practice, High Bridge House Studios, Newcastle upon Tyne Return To Sender, The Spitz Gallery, Spitalfields, London Best In Show, The Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh Small World, Seven Seven Contemporary Art Gallery, London Painting with Light, Contemporary artists' video screening, Cafe Gallery Projects, Southwark Park, London Wide Open, Architecture Week 2004, Side Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne Awards 2006 Juliet Gomperts Trust Project Award, London 2005 Short-listed for the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2005, London 2004 Arts Council England, Grants for Individuals 2003 Churches' Commission for Students Award, London 2000 International Student Scholarship, University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne Newby Trust Award, London 1999 Barclaycard National Student Drawing Awards, Second Prize, NENE University, Northampton 1998 International Student Scholarship, Swindon School of Art, Swindon 1997 International Student Scholarship, Oxfordshire of Art & Design, Banbury

Caitlin Heffernan

Louise Hopkins

Born in Exeter in 1975. Lives and works in Brighton

Born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire in 1965. Lives and works in Glasgow

Education 2004 Central St Martin’s College of Art & Design, M.F.A 1998 Winchester School of Art, B.A (Hons)

Education 1994 Glasgow School of Art, M.F.A 1988 University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, B.A (Hons)

Selected Group Exhibitions 2006 Drawing Room, Phoenix Gallery, Brighton City Running, Phoenix Arts Association, Brighton Fringe Festival 2005 Jerwood Drawing Prize 2005, Jerwood Space, London. Touring to: Pittville Gallery, Cheltenham; Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow; Bayart, Cardiff; The Study Gallery, Poole 2005 What Happens When Everything Is Reduced to Ones and Zeros?, Pearlfisher Gallery, London Sussex Open 2005 ‘Words-Imagination, Fantasy and Tales’, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, Brighton 2004 Perspective 2004 Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast MA Fine Art Degree Show, Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design, London The Inscriptive Ferret, Space 44, Fish Island, London 2003 artinheaven, Brighton Fringe Festival, The Meeting House, Sussex University Here, Lethaby Gallery, Southampton Row, London 2002 The Haven, Phoenix Gallery, Brighton

Solo Exhibitions 2005 Freedom of Information, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 2004 The Round Room, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh 2003 doggerfisher, Edinburgh Andrew Mummery Gallery, London 2001 Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 1999 Andrew Mummery Gallery, London 1998 Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan 1997 artconnexion, Lille Galerie Isabella Kackprzack, Berlin 1996 Tramway Project Room, Glasgow; Andrew Mummery Gallery, London 1994 Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen 1993 Photospace, Canberra School of Art, Canberra 1992 Ben Grady Gallery, Canberra

Awards 2004 Arts Council Individual Award

Selected Group Exhibitions 2007 Doubleuse, The Nunnery, London 2006 Limits, Andrew Mummery Gallery, London 2005 Mythomania, The Metropole Galleries, Folkstone Remarkable, Andrew Mummery Gallery, London Showcase: Contemporary Art for the UK, City Art Centre & Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh 2004 Things Domestic, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne The Birthday Party, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh Artists at Glenfiddich, Glenfiddich Distillery, Dufftown 2003 Love over Gold, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Pretty Little Things, The Ship, London 2002 Words, Plymouth Museum & Art Gallery, Arts Council Collection National Touring Exhibition Sunday Afternoon, 303 Gallery, New York Anywhere, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, NY New, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh The Embarkation for Cythera, Andrew Mummery Gallery, London Life is Beautiful, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne From the Saatchi Gift, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh 2001 Here+Now, Scottish Art 1990-2000, Dundee Contemporary Arts and venues in Dundee and Aberdeen Open Country, Musee Cantonal des Beaux Arts de Lausanne Tenable, Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance

Martin Kersels

2000 Movin On Up (Part 2), Andrew Mummery Gallery, London A Day Like Any Other, Kulturhaus, Stavanger Secret Garden, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham 45th Salon de Montrouge, Montrouge, Centre for Contemporary Art, Lisbon 1999 Absolute Open, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh On Paper, Stalke Galleri, Copenhagen NINENINENINETYNINE, Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London The Order of Things, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool 1998 Urban Romantics (part 1), Lombard Freid Fine Arts, New York, NY Nettwerk Glasgow, Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo Secret Victorians, organised by the Hayward Gallery, opening at First Site, Colchester. Touring to: Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Arnolfini, Bristol; UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA 1997 Jerwood Painting Prize ‘97, Central Saint Martin’s College, London Lemonade, Andrew Mummery Gallery, London Pure Fantasy, Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno Glasgow, Kunsthalle Bern Loaded, Ikon, Birmingham 1996 New Contemporaries ‘96, Tate Gallery, Liverpool and Camden Arts Centre 1995 The Persistence of Painting, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow Project Room, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh Swarm, Scottish Arts Council Travelling Gallery Composite, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol 1994 New Art In Scotland-part 1, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow Awards 2002 Creative Scotland Award, Scottish Arts Council Lottery Award 2001 Research and Training Award Richard Hough Resource, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh 1997 Artist Award Scottish Arts Council 1994 First Exhibition Award, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen 1994 Richard Ellis Award, Glasgow School of Art Collections Arts Council of England Artbank, Sydney Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen British Council, London Jumex Collection, Mexico Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Museum of Modern Art, New York Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh Musee Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1960. Lives and works in Los Angeles Education 1995 University of California, Los Angeles, M.F.A 1984 University of California, Los Angeles, B.A Solo Exhibitions 2006 Charms in a Throne Room, ACME., Los Angeles, CA 2005 Orchestra for Idiots, Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris 2003 Wishing Well, ACME., Los Angeles, CA 2002 Showette, ACME., Los Angeles, CA Fat Man, Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris Bracelet, Peggy Phelps Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California 2001 Modern Art, London, England Galerie Edward Mitterand, Geneva, Switzerland ACME.,Los Angeles Tumble Room, Deitch Projects, New York 2000 Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland 1999 Spinning, Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris, France Dan Bernier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1998 Dan Bernier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Theoretical Events (Th.e), Naples, Italy 1997 Commotion: Martin Kersels, Madison Art Center, Madison. Touring to: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, CA 1996 Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York, NY 1995 Dan Bernier Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 1993 A/B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Selected Recent Group Exhibitions 2006 Accidents, Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris 2005 Dionysiac, Pompidou Center, Paris 2004 100 Artists See God, Independent Curators International, New York Suburban House Kit, Deitch Projects, New York, NY 2003 ACME. @ Inman, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX Yankee Remix: Artists Take on New England, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA Neuro: An Art & Science Collaboration, The California Institute of Technology & The Art Center College of Art & Design, Pasadena, CA 2002 L.A. Post Cool, The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA Majestic Sprawl: Some Los Angeles Photography, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA Strolling Through an Ancient Shrine and Garden, ACME., Los Angeles, CA Ideal Avalanche, The Pond, Chicago, IL Sudden Glory: Sight Gags and Slapstick in Contemporary Art, Logan Galleries, California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco, CA

Nina Saunders

2001 Portraits, Galerie Edward Mitterrand, Geneva, Switzerland The Americans: New Art., Barbican Art Gallery, London Soliel d’hiver/Sur un cheval/Une silouette gelée, Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris, France Ever Since Icarus, Lord Mori Gallery, Los Angeles, CA The Sensational Line, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO 2000 Inventional, Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Haulin’ Ass, Pierogi in L.A., POST, Los Angeles, CA SOS: Scenes of Sounds, The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY Made in California and Made in California – NOW, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA 1999 Melbourne Biennial, Melbourne, Australia EXTRAetORDINAIRE, Le Printemps de Cahors, Cahors, France Group Show, Brett-Mitchell, Inc., Cleveland, OH 1998 Young Americans 2, Saatchi Gallery, London, England Band Wi[d]th, Knitting Factory, New York, NY Group Show, W-139, Amsterdam, Holland Need for Speed, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria Cruising L.A.: Paul McCarthy, Martin Kersels, Catherine Opie, Lari Pittman, Jason Rhoades, Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, Spain 1997 Vanessa Beecroft, Hennifer Bornstein, Martin Kersels, Gillian Wearing, S.L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada COLA: 1996-1997 Individual Artists Grants, The Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles, CA Celluloid Cave, Threadwaxing Space, New York, NY Group Show, New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA 1997 Biennial of American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Ten Los Angeles Artists, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, CA Awards 1999 Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts Fellowship 1996 City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department Individual Artists Grant Collections Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France Museu d’Art Contemporàni de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA

Born in Odense, Denmark in 1958. Lives and works in London Education 1991 Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design, London, B.A (Hons) Selected Solo Exhibitions 2007 Sincerely Yours, Galleri Specta, Copenhagen 2006 It’s About Your Request To Be Let Out Of The Forest, Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm 2005 Autumn leaves, New Art Centre, Salisbury Liberty’s Window, Regent Street, London 2003 Nature or Nurture, Galleri Specta, Copenhagen 2002 Here for Now, the apartment, Athens The Kiosk Project, London 2001 Note Arte Contemporanea, Arezzo, Italy 2000 Efter stormen, Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm Hardback, The Economist, London Priority Zone, British Arts Council, Brussels 1997 Hidden Agenda, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool in collaboration with the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland 1995 Familiar Territories, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull 1992 Priority Zone, 1992 Festival, Hull

Jennie Savage

Selected Recent Group Exhibitions 2007 I Love Malmo, Turku Art Museum, Kuntsi, Museum of Modern Art, Vaasa 2006 Still Life, New Art Centre, Roche Court, Salisbury Sensory Material, Bonhams, London 2005 Post_Modellismus, Krinzinger Gallery, Vienna 2004 Malmo Konstmuseum, Malmo Stad Forskudte Hverdagsobjekter, Trapholt Art Museum, Kolding Art Futures, Contemporary Art Society, London Domestic (F)utility, New Centre Sculpture Park and Gallery, Salisbury 2003 The articulated dream, Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm of innocence & experience, the apartment, Athens Artfutures, Contemporary Art Society, London Home Sweet Home, Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark 2002 Hygiene, The Art of Public Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London Sitting Tenants, Lotta Hammer Gallery, London Nina Saunders Forever, The Kiosk Project, London 2001 The (Ideal) Home Show, Gimpel Fils, London Nu blommar det!, Norrköpings konstmuseum, Norrköping, Sweden Humid, Spike Island, Bristol. Touring to Australia and New Zealand 2000 Umedalen skulptur 2000, Umeå, Sweden 1999 Welcome, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh In the midst of things, Bournville, Birmingham 1999 Saatchi in Sheffield, Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield Claustrophobia, Middlesborough Art Gallery, Middlesborough. Touring to: Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee; Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield; Cartwright Hall, Bradford; Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, Denmark; CVA, Cardiff Culbutes dans le Millenaire, Musée d art Contemporain de Montreal, Montreal 1998 Fetish Show, Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada Me and You, Walsall Museum & Art Gallery, Walsall ARTfutures, Royal Festival Hall, London Collections Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London Ferens Art Gallery, Hull Saatchi Collection, London Walsall Museum & Art Gallery, West Midlands Roland Company, London Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, Denmark Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden Private Collection, Lord Renfrew, Cambridge Private collections in Europe and USA

Born in Southampton in 1975. Lives and works in Cardiff Education 1999 University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, M.A 1997 University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, B.A (Hons) Solo Exhibitions 2006 Out in The World, Méduse, Québec City, produced in collaboration with Avatar as part of a 3 month residency funded by Wales Arts International 2005 STAR Radio, National Museum and Galleries of Wales STAR Radio project, www.starradio.org.uk Anecdotal Cardiff, residency and projects, Cardiff 2002 “….And Then I returned It To The Sea”, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery “Exhibition Of Unrealised Ideas” and “...And Then I Returned It To The Sea”, Rotherham Art Centre, Rotherham Selected Group Exhibitions 2006 Lost Artist Idea, General Public Project Space, Berlin Common – Wealth Museum, Next wave Festival, Melbourne Australia Note To Self, g39, Cardiff 2005 Identitades, Morelia, Mexico 2004 Rhwnt, Québec/ Wales exchange at Le Lieu, Québec City Urban Legacies, CBAT, Cardiff 2002 Ffresh3, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff 2001 Mapping, collaboration with Maria Wilson, g39, Cardiff Art From Wales - A new generation, Openspace, Milan, 2000 Modern Fairy Tales, Leicester City Gallery, Leicester Making History, site based work for ‘Terra Infirma’, Hurst Castle, Hampshire 1999 Ffresh 2, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff Rant From Another Realm, C.S.V, New York, NY 1998 Pistol, g39, Cardiff

Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson

Both born in 1969 in Lund, Sweden Both live and work in Stockholm and Lund, Sweden Education 1996 Ola Simonsson: The Malmö Academy of Music, Malmö, Sweden, MFA 1997 Johannes Stjärne Nilsson: University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Sweden, MFA Selected Filmography 2006 Kvinna Vid Grammofon / Woman and Gramophone, 4min 2005 Spättans väg / Way of the Flounder, 10min 2004 Du Var Där Med Din Polare Frank / You Were There With Your Friend Frank, 10min, doc 2002 Hotel Rienne, 27 min Fika - Sveriges Paus / Fika – The Swedish Break, 28min, doc 2001 Music For One Apartment and Six Drummers, 10min 2000 Sverige / Sweden, 8min Herr Pendel / Mr. Pendel, 12 x 5min 1997 Mellan Hav Och Himmel / Sea and Sky, 27min, doc Leonard Pläd / Leonard Plaid, 120min Var Man I Cannes / Our Man in Cannes, 6min Wanted! Popmusiker! / Wanted! Popmusicians!, 10min 1996 Bakom Mahognybordet / Nowhere Man, 8min 1995 Hur Vore Det Med Eternit / An Advice Concerning a Roof, 10min 1994 Puls / Pulse, 14min 1992 Antikvariat, 13min 1990 Och Sjön Fylles / The Lake is Filled, 15min Awards Kvinna Vid Grammofon / Woman And Gramophone: 2006 Selected for Int Critic's Week Cannes Selected for Karlovy Vary FF

Spättans Väg / Way Of The Flounder: 2006 Second Prize - Almeria en Corto Short Film Festival 2005 Prix Fiction - Festival de l’Image sous-marine d’Antibes Selected for Karlovy Vary FF You Were There With Your Friend Frank / Du Var Där Med Din Polare Frank: 2005 Audience Award - Minimalen Short Film Festival 2004 Best Regional Short - Umeå Film Festival Best Swedish Short - Uppsala International Film Festival Music For One Apartment And Six Drummers 2004 Young Public Prize - International Film Festival of Aubagne

2003 Honorable Mention - Festival Int'l Du Film Sur L'Art Montréal Best film - Festival Internacional de Cine del Uruguay 2002 National Award: Golden Beetle Award Audience Award - Paris Film Festival Honorable Mention - Paris Film Festival Audience Award - Short Film Festival Réunion Island Ellen Award: Most Original Film - Aspen Shortfest Silver Key - Bratislava Art Film Festival Audience Award - Cambridge Film Festival Soleil d'Or - Best of Short Films Festivals La Ciotat Prix Special Collegiens - Festival Cinessonne European Award - Sequence Short Film Festival Toulouse Audience Award - Leuven Short Film Festival 2001 Official selection - Cannes Best Nordic film - Nordic Panorama Best film - Capalbio Film Festival Grand prize - Napa Valley Film Festival Audience Award - Göteborg Film Festival Honorable mention - Göteborg Film Festival City of Regensburg Film Award - Regensburg Audience Award - Regensburg Audience Award - Vendome Film Festival Special Prize of the Jury - Cinemae Short Film Festival Audience Award - Mecal Film Festival Barcelona Honorable Mention - Copenhagen Film Festival Special Prize of the Jury - Odense Film Festival Top 10 films - Sao Paulo Short Film Festival Audience Award - Vila do Conde Film Festival

Hotel Rienne: 2003 Best Film and Best Short Fiction - Gävle Film Festival Best Short Film - Dresden Filmfest 2002 Canal+ Award - Brest Film Festival Honorable mention - Brest Film Festival Special prize of the jury - Vendôme Film Festival Sverige / Sweden: 2000 Audience Award - Göteborg Film Festival Bakom Mahogbybordet / Nowhere Man: 1997 Selected for The Venice Biennale 1996 Best Short - Toronto Film Festival Gold Plaque Award - Chicago TV Festival Selected for Int Critic's Week Cannes Hur Vore Det Med Eternit / An Advice Concerning A Roof: 1996 Best Documentary - Kill Your Darlings Copenhagen

Comfort Zones is an Oriel Davies Gallery Touring Exhibition

Oriel Davies Gallery would like to thank the following individuals and organisations who have helped with the realisation of this exhibition and catalogue: Chris Townsend, Darren Banks, Paul Bush, Maia Conran, Katie Cuddon, Anka Dabrowska, Caitlin Heffernan, Louise Hopkins, Martin Kersels, Nina Saunders, Jennie Savage, Ola Simonsson, Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, Ivo de Sanctis, Arts Council Collection (Hayward Gallery, London), Deitch Projects (New York), New Art Centre (Roche Court, Salisbury), Specta: Copenhagen, Anna Luhn, David Roberts, Emma Williams, Amanda Farr, Neil Fowler, Francis Corfield, Clare Martin, Helen Kozich, Robert Lowe. Our greatest thanks are also extended to the Henry Moore Foundation and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation who have supported the exhibition, catalogue and UK tour

Essays by Chris Townsend and Emma Williams Edited by Emma Williams, Amanda Farr and Matthew Richardson Designed by Matthew Richardson (matthew@hoofandclaw.co.uk) Illustrations by Anka Dabrowska

Picture credits: Cover: Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (still), 2001 Louise Hopkins, Aurora 13 , 1995-96, courtesy the Artist and Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London Martin Kersels, Pink Constellation , 2001, courtesy the Artist and Deitch Projects, New York All other works reproduced courtesy of the Artists

ISBN: 978 1 870797 20 5 Catalogue published by Oriel Davies Gallery © Oriel Davies Gallery, the artists, Chris Townsend and Emma Williams All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in form by any means, electrical, mechanical, or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and the publisher.

Exhibition Tour 31 March - 19 May 2007 Oriel Davies Gallery The Park, Newtown Powys SY16 2NZ Telephone 01686 625041 www.orieldavies.org 7 July - 2 September 2007 Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery Castle Street, Carlisle Cumbria CA3 8TP Telephone 01228 534781 www.tulliehouse.co.uk 1 November 2007 - 10 January 2008 Foyer / James Hockey Galleries at the University College for the Creative Arts Falkner Road, Farnham Surrey GU9 7DS Telephone 01252 722441 www.ucreative.ac.uk/galleries 19 January - 1 March 2008 Quay Arts Sea Street, Newport Harbour Isle of Wight PO30 5BD Telephone 01983 824160 www.quayarts.org

Comfort Zones mixes installation, textile, sculpture, drawing, video and short film. The works play with humour, encouraging us to look at our own homes, belongings, rituals and comforts with fondness and indulgence. Yet not all the comfort zones explored here are what they might seem. Many of the works in this exhibition are disconcerting, questioning, and often surreal, revealing events, memories and stories far from what we might expect. Our homes are exposed as sinister, unknown places, which can make us feel unsettled or even afraid.

Featuring a newly commissioned essay by Chris Townsend entitled ‘Domestic Virtues: Art, Interiority and Domesticity’ and an introductory essay by curator, Emma Williams, this catalogue explores the fascinating relationship between art and the domestic space, and offers new insights into the works of the artists in the exhibition.

Artists in Comfort Zones are: Darren Banks, Paul Bush, Maia Conran, Katie Cuddon, Anka Dabrowska, Caitlin Heffernan, Louise Hopkins, Martin Kersels, Nina Saunders, Jennie Savage, Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson