Opening Night @ House Taken Over

I was in the fortunate position to be invited to create a response to Hickey & Hickey's inaugural curation, House Taken Over. A site-specific show, on for one weekend only as part of Sonorities Festival, last night was the opening night.

This is a house I already know well, from dinners, Christmas parties, birthday parties, a wedding, drinking wine in the kitchen, Halloween bonfires, watching movies... So it was very different and in many ways unheimlich to consider the house itself as an entity separate from the family I know living here; a fundamentally empty space.

I was particularly inspired by three stories about the house. The first involved the house's covert purpose durung WWII as a listening post; a theory proposed by some local historuans which acted as the inspiration for the whole curation. Secondly a story that Ciara told me about how the house's previous residents used to send the house itself, rather than the family now living there, Christmas cards after they moved out. And finally a story that Elizabeth told us about a friend of theirs who, many years ago, was adamant that when she was staying in the house that she heard it say goodnight to her.

So I had a lot of rich material to draw on in creating 'The Time Of Their Coming', my response to House Taken Over, the themes it explores, and the house itself.

...One solitary afternoon
I came across a trove of notebooks
Filled with your spidery hand...