Home: An Installation for Living In

Abstract

The subject of ‘home’ has long preoccupied the arts and humanities, from the longing of homesickness, to the art of domestic interiors, and Virginia Woolf’s plea for creative homecoming in ‘a room of one’s own’. The fragile relationship between owning and losing a home is a contemporary concern in a turbulent economic age. In traditional archaeological contexts, one can examine the sudden abandonment of home, the result of natural disaster, war, famine or unknown causes; here I consider how this might work in more recent contexts (see also Schofield, Digging for (Invisible) People, 2010).