Come and talk with Harriet about what ‘HOME’ means to you…

HOME-ing: a live art odyssey on foot from London to Wales

Wearing a costume of the word ‘HOME’, artist Harriet Hill will perform a month-long walk from her home in South-East London to her childhood home in Mid Wales. En route she will talk to people about what the word means to them and how that has been affected by the pandemic; interactions that will be recorded and edited into a film to be exhibited alongside the costume in a group show in Helsinki this coming September.

With funding from a National Lottery Project Grant from Arts Council England, Harriet will set off on 22nd June, arriving at her childhood home on 25th July. Accompanied each day by a walking companion, her route passes through Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and finally into Powys. As she walks, Harriet will be stopping off for day residencies at several local arts centres: the Feminist Library, Peckham; HOME on the High Street, Slough; OVADA, Oxford; About Face Theatre Company, Leominster; and finally The Sidney Nolan Trust, Presteigne.

Harriet’s costume is made from yellow canvas over a bamboo and fibreglass frame mounted on a pair of 20” bike wheels. Inside the word is everything the artist needs to make home for the month of the walk – from a pull-out tent to a solar charger. The work builds on a previous project in which volunteers wearing the letters H, O, M, and E interviewed members of the public about what home means to them. A film of this project can be viewed here.

HOME-ing embodies the universal and the personal. It is a bold, walking word sculpture that will capture people’s imagination as it passes by. As she journeys, Harriet will explore how her childhood experience of moving from urban South London to rural Wales in the 1970s made her feel both an outsider and at home in the two locations. Passing through many diverse communities she will investigate the commonalities and differences in how people relate to home, revealing a snap-shot of the British public at this transitional moment in UK history.

Harriet is a visual artist with a distinction in MFA in Textiles from Goldsmiths University. She creates sculpture, site-specific installation and interactive live art that explores the emotive qualities of materials, physical space and social frameworks. Her work has been selected for Politics in Art show at MOCAK, Krakow 2022 and she was commissioned by Art in the Churches in 2019 to create an installation in rural Yorkshire. Details of other work and exhibitions can be found at: www.harriethill.co.uk

“HOME is a potent word, particularly now with Brexit, the refugee crisis, rising homelessness and the impact of COVID lockdowns. It can mean a place, a physical structure, a deep emotional bond or an absence of any of these. For me, wearing this unwieldy costume is an absurdist personal and political act; a visualisation of liberation and ties, the burden and comfort and feelings of belonging and isolation that ”home” can be.” – Harriet Hill

Below is an itinerary of the walk and any updated information about the project will be posted here

Follow harrietlhill on instagram for daily updates throughout the walk #homeingproject

For a map of the route go here