HOMELAND

2006

Homeland is the work we made in the course of a two-month residency at Sculpture Space, in Utica, New York.

Coming to Utica we had hoped to be able to take advantage of the city’s remarkable architectural heritage - and the circumstances that have left so many of its buildings empty. In the event, however, we ended up making work that responded to Utica as a whole.

We made a unique handmade Utica wallpaper, which gave us the opportunity to employ traditional skills and combine them with up-to the minute digital printing technology. Wallpaper tells a story. It transforms a space. The wallpaper features old keys that we collected in Utica, and images of some of the buildings in Utica that had a particular resonance for us.

Wallpapers have names, and Homeland is the name for the wallpaper as well as the installation. ‘Homeland’ has many associations. For us the comfortable and domestic connotations are in stark contrast to alien ideas of homeland security.  Our thoughts of our own home came to the fore as we considered parallels and divergences between the two cultures.

The work is about the process we went through making sculpture in Utica and thus evidence of the process becomes part of the installation. We cast thousands of keys in wax and this became a ritual that was recorded on video to become part of the installation.

The process did not end with the installation at Sculpture Space– the work is portable and adaptable. It has since been shown in the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and following on from that exhibition we made a new wallpaper for the Year of Homecoming in 2009, which was exhibited at the RSA during the 2009 Edinburgh Visual Arts Festival.

Wax keys

Homeland installed in the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh

Materials and tools used in making the wallpaper, and a small screen showing a video of the process of casting the wax keys

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