sophia moffa (Italy)
Title: Inner houses, Outer houses
Inner houses, Outer houses, 2022
Medium: Pit-fired hand-collected clay
Date of work: 2022
Dimensions: 28” x 7” x 3”
Description:
This is an installation of a row of houses made from clay filtered from soil and fired in the ground. The work explores the notion of “home,” referencing newly arrived asylum seekers in Birmingham, England displaced by conflict, persecution, and extraction. The work questions the idea of home by both those who are recreating one and those who have never lost one. The stereotypical image of a home is a square house with a pointy roof. During crisis we cling to this safe and familiar appearance of a home, while adapting its meaning, which is filled with incoherencies and paradoxes; the more we question what home is, the more its image becomes abstracted. Our lives from childhood to adulthood influence our feelings of home, which continuously change as life around us changes: pandemics, war, family, income, etc. These houses are made from soil from the new “homes” of asylum seekers, filtered to make clay, impressed with the veins of leaves of the surrounding trees and fired in a pit using the ancient saggar technique.
