WORDS Maisie Richards Cottell
PHOTO Terry Watts
Ever felt you couldn’t bring your friends back to your house because you were too embarrassed? Or you simply wouldn’t know how to explain what they would find there? To this day I can count on one hand the amount of times some of my closest school friends, people I’ve known for over ten years, have been to my house.
I like to think of my family as a mix of Fawlty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous: openly dysfunctional either way. My dad devours books, plays instruments and can build his own furniture. Equally he accumulates — no, hoards — antiques to a point where he has filled three sheds in the garden and we have four pianos and an organ in the house. And this is not a large house. Not to mention, in one of his finer moments, he was banned from my school parent’s evenings after turning up stoned one year and upsetting the geography teacher. My mum is your average artist who takes her kids on anti-war marches, has a perchance for asymmetrical haircuts and Dr. Martens, and loves to dance. Actually they both love to dance. All in all they are a very supportive, perhaps slightly offbeat, pair who have been known to throw a good party or two.
Also, for the last thirteen years they have turned my house into an art installation.
“Imagine eating your breakfast in a kitchen behind a blue net as a pile of random strangers stand on the other side taking photographs of you in fascination.”
My mum is an artist who works primarily in installation, often with a live element (although she has dabbled in performance art — I once watched her stand in a UV lit room and stab herself, causing pockets of UV paint to burst from her dress, a sight for any eight -year-old). So as my dad’s burgeoning antique collection started to touch the ceiling my mum decided the best way to deal with it would be to convert the house into art. Inviting random strangers to come into our house and watch…
Really, I like to think of it as a metaphor for their marriage. Whenever my dad had overstepped the mark and we once again had two layers of furniture against a wall instead of one, my mum seemed to respond with a “well I’ll just have to do an art installation then!” To be fair to her, one day I did come home from school to find my dad had taken up some floorboards in the living room and was proceeding to hide various items of taxidermy under them.
And so what began as an attempt to stem a flow of cameras, old microscopes and a lot of stuff that seemed broken in the first place, from entering our house has ended up lasting thirteen years and been affectionately titled “The House Projects”.
“The House Projects”, in conjunction with Cafe Gallery Projects, have involved building huge installations that have carved through our house, operating as viewing platforms in which the audience move through the building and observe the occupants. Starting in 2001 the installations were listed in Time Out and The Guardian and every Sunday the house would be open to the public, with perhaps 200 people visiting each of the various installations. The installations have had various reincarnations, from raised white platforms to blue netted tunnels, but what has remained constant is the separation between the viewer and the occupant.
Of course the point was that the house was ours and the occupants were my sister Lulu, Dad and I. More often than not still in our pyjamas. Imagine eating your breakfast in a kitchen behind a blue net — which you’ve only managed to get to by going into the garden and climbing back in through the kitchen window — as a pile of random strangers stand on the other side taking photographs of you in fascination. Or stubbing your toe on a newly erected installation and swearing loudly as you walk into the kitchen only to find an art critic sitting at the kitchen table. An art critic who incidentally had just asked your mum how her family copes living with this, to which she’d replied, “Oh they’re fine with it.” Although my mum did generously wait till I’d come to Dublin before she decided that one of the installations should carve straight through my bedroom, a difficulty that comes with having a bedroom downstairs.
We would live with these installations for months, sometimes years, at a time and so they became part of the furniture. We ate Christmas dinner on them, did our homework on them and of course they were our very own stages.
Mum once heard a woman on the radio telling her daughter that it didn’t matter what life threw at you because she could put it all in a book one day. To which, mum came straight into the living room yelling to me and Lulu, “See, you’ll put all this in a book one day!” I think we just looked up from the TV rather unimpressed both having just put on our fourth jumper as, due to a new installation, we couldn’t close any doors and it was December. Only on going back into the kitchen did she catch the rest of the radio program and realised that said woman was describing escaping civil war. Mum did admit this Christmas that perhaps the whole thing had been “a bit mad” but if I ever write that sketch show I’m not short of material. And I am sure it has, in part, led to me spending the last four years knocking round Players designing sets. Plus, although I’d never say it to her face, you do really appreciate your sibling because you realise they saw it all too.
A visitor to the house who discovered me eating breakfast one Sunday morning behind the blue net once asked whether I was at art school myself. On replying that I was studying English Literature she gasped disbelievingly, “Oh god you must have no idea what’s going on then!” Restraining an urge to throw my cornflakes at her, I smiled, shrugged and allowed her, with her MA in Critical Theory to enlighten me — why were there all these people in my house? But perhaps she was right, not that I didn’t know what was going on, but that, as most people find, it has taken having distance from my house to take stock of the upbringing we had and what we lived in.
Although, I do sometimes think someone should have called social services.
