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No Place Like Home (2023-25)

No Place Like Home takes inspiration from Dorothy Gale’s exclamation “Oh Aunty Em, there’s no

place like home!” upon returning from her adventure through Oz. Dorothy realises that the lure of

magic and adventure in far away wonderlands cannot replace the comfort and familiarity of home.

However, my series explores how home itself can become a fantasy, namely the memory of home, and what happens when the feeling of being at home changes.

Photographed in an imaginary doll’s house, the series’ setting becomes a repository for feelings

of loss and estrangement: growing distance from the home of the past and a subsequent

disconnection from the self. A fight to control that which is slipping away, to cling onto the past

self, is expressed through the imagined escape back to the childhood doll’s house, where, as

children, we were able to control all aspects of a doll’s environment and surroundings.

However,these miniature domestic surroundings also served to instruct young girls on their future expectedroles within the household. The two in the series characters then enact the battle between fantasy and reality inherent within the doll’s house: a desire to take comfort in the familiar home of the past self either recognises or wilfully ignores such an escape’s futility that inevitably returns to the claustrophobic inherited roles of womanhood. Such a battle ultimately leaves a greater sense of loss, displacing the present self further from that which is familiar, as home cannot be returned to: it doesn’t exist anymore, viewed now through a lens that is no longer rose-tinted.