We are pleased to announce that The Share House Project has been selected for the ART, NOT APART Festival in Canberra on Saturday 16 March!
The Share House Project – Open Home is a participatory work inside an apartment on Kendall Lane, NewActon South. We invite you into our Open Home to play with hundreds of copies of the memory drawings generously shared by contributors. Help us map out the architecture of an enormous but impossible house! Hope to see you there.
The Share House Project is a collaboration between writer Janine Mikosza and visual artist Stephanie Jones. We are exploring speculative architecture built on the foundations of memory, and are asking members of the public to contribute by drawing the floor plans of their childhood homes from memory.
CONTRIBUTE to the project by drawing, from memory, the floor plan of your childhood home. If you had more than one home, draw the floor plan of the house that you remember best or was significant to you.
THE SHARE HOUSE PROJECT is evolving over time. It is the outcome of a joint residency that Stephanie and Janine undertook at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia, in early 2018. Visitors to the arts centre were invited to recall their childhood homes and draw a floor plan of their home from memory. Over the course of one week, the artists collected almost one hundred drawings, which they photocopied, cut up and reassembled on the walls of their studio.
For the remainder of their residency, the artists mapped out the speculative architecture of an enormous shared house. Built on the foundations of memory, this reconstructed domestic space was refurbished and cohabited by the ideals, dreams, realities and disturbances found within the original drawings. A gigantic, amorphous floor plan emerged, continually reconfigured as it spread across the studio walls. The artists experimented with a range of compositional devices (clustered, fractured, linear) while also exploring and discussing strategies for three-dimensional outcomes, including an installation of digitally projected and animated images.
With this range of possibilities, Janine and Stephanie are now working towards an exhibition and possible publication. In order to increase the scale of the final work, they are seeking further contributions of memory drawings.
GUIDELINES For the purposes of this project, all types of homes (flats, townhouses, caravans, sheds) count as ‘houses’. If you lived in many different houses, please draw the one that is most significant – whether it be the one you remember best, or loved the most, or perhaps even hated. We’d like it to be a place you lived in before becoming an adult, unless of course you’ve spent your whole life in the one home! The key point is that you draw from memory, without any other aids (such as photographs, measurements, or actual floor plans).
Your drawing can be in any medium and any scale, as long as you are able to scan or photograph it and submit as a digital image. If you would prefer to send your original drawing, please email us and we will provide a postal address.
We would like you to focus on the physical architecture of the home itself, even though we appreciate that outdoor features (such as trees and gardens, nearby streets and fields) may also be highly resonant in terms of your memories of place.
You may choose to label or annotate your floor plan, but it is also fine to leave it free of any text or personal detail.
Please do not feel that your drawing has to look like anyone else’s. We are interested in a diversity of drawing styles and abilities. No drawing is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. We are fascinated by the differences in how people remember – the uncertain and vague are just as important as the clear and concrete!
By submitting a drawing to The Share House Project, you agree that the artists Janine Mikosza and Stephanie Jones may use your image as source material and that it may be reproduced, wholly or in part, in their artwork.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The artists would like to acknowledge everyone who has contributed a memory drawing to the project, and this will take the form of a simple list of names whenever a public exhibition or publication occurs, including online. No other personal information will be divulged. If you prefer to remain anonymous, that will also be respected.
Thank you to Fremantle Arts Centre for providing a month’s studio space and accommodation in the beautiful City of Fremantle, where this project was first conceived and developed.
An interview with Stephanie and Janine discussing their project at Fremantle Arts Centre can be found here.
