HOME / 2011 Art X Detroit / Abigail Anne Newbold

Abigail Anne Newbold

 

Title: Home Maker series

Medium:

Year Created: 2011

Abigail Anne Newbold is interested in cognitive and kinesthetic understandings of home, and the tempting notion of learning to provide shelter for herself in an increasingly more complicated superstructure of society. Her installation, Home Maker series, showcases an on-going series of kits that build on one-another to culminate in the ability to build a home from the ground up. Straddling the vestiges of traditional craft, DIY design sensibilities, and the beginnings of an anthropological survey of domesticity, Newbold’s work illustrates in physical dimensions a conflict in how we live.

We are at once torn between an increased availability and reliance on the product market, and a desire for more personalized living. As function and utility are spoon-fed to us, what happens when we look critically at the building blocks of our homes and our home tools—those essential instruments that ultimately help to define the character of our spaces? What happens if we leave the fold of the big-box-store and we begin to craft our own tools and build our own homes? How would our relationship with our homes change? Created from financial necessity and paired with our inescapable human need for shelter to survive, Newbold finds irony in this era of exponential new technologies that there are also opportunities for individuals to be self-sufficient. We could at once be entering an era of folk architecture- changing the monotony of the store-bought landscape, and in the process be reviving basic skills of hand-making integral to survival and creativity and this excites her.

www.abigailanne.com