Erin Laura Hughes
Home Me 3
2 - 29 November 2017 | Domino Houses Billboard, Bounds Green Road, N22 8YB
Home Me 3 depicts asimple interior using home-improvement materials to look at our domestic living experience.
The work is loosely based oninteriors in the house Erin grew up in, a relatively small house in a middle class town in the south of England. The work simply reformats the home as a backdrop, as a human version of the highly saturated images of underwater scenes you can find in fish tanks. Self-mocking suburban repression is at play, with the interior acting as a container made of products from ‘DIY’ superstores. Erin uses materials as they are intended in ‘real life’ such as wall emulsion on the walls or skirting board as skirting board. This deadpan gesture is marked by the starkness of the interiors that offer no doors or windows.
On closer inspection, the romanticised, aspirational ‘DIY’ attitude is undermined by the lack of dignity of the mass produced materials used and the clumsy handling of the construction. For example the chips of paint, dust or brush marks that to a trained eye, reveal that the wrong tools have been used. This subtle exposure of cruddy craftsmanship is a reflection of domestic living today, where we are less and less manually practical. This contributes to an infantilization of domestic living experience that is reflected in the choice of bright, childlike colours in the work.
Plug sockets are a recurring motif in Erin’s work. Pointing to technology and thus to an interlinked global world, they carry the promise of a potential escapism from the stagnant and inanimate suburban repression. The aesthetic of the interiors themselves are also associated with virtual spaces, or low graphic virtual mazes, for example the Windows 95 screen saver or early video games like LSD.
Erin LauraHughes is an artist based in London currently studying her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. After completing her BFA from Oxford University she spent three years living and working in Berlin where she became co-founder of Cypher Space and Cypher Collective. | www.erinlaurahughes.com
