Subjective Suburbia

Joanna Williams

Her practice does not accept the city as it is, but rather an artistic canvas awaiting exploration into the hidden potential with which it offers. Her work is an attempt to engage the city user with their city; to awaken new and unforeseen perspectives, to reflect upon the conditions of our surroundings and invite us to negotiate the city, to experience it and to read its messages. Her more recent works perform Michel de Certeau’s resistant re-writing of the city by opening up a multitude of creative opportunities for alternate engagement that exists far beyond the conventions of architectural and urban planning. In extending our vision beyond these conventions, not only can we comprehend the creative potential of the city, we are made more aware of the integral nature of representation and construction of our city spaces.Consistently throughout her practice is a manifestation of the fold, a process based response and experimentation with de Certeau’s processes of resistance, as well as an exploration of the limits that regulate our urban spaces and provoke alternate strategies for addressing the way city spaces are constructed, regulated and negotiated. The fold produces a dynamic space where infinite possibilities, processes and virtuality can unfold across diverse architectural landscapes with no definable beginning or end; rather, an evolving continuum.

Lee Adele

"The house would appear to have become the topography for our intimate being." - Gaston Bachelard

When talking about a snail, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard observes that this flabbiest of creatures constitutes such a hard shell. It is impossible to separate a snail from its shell without destroying both because they are intimately connected in much the same way we are united with our multi-layered shells. My work is an exploration of this relationship and both draw heavily from Bachelard’s writing in ‘The Poetics of Space’. He was not the first to apply the theory of phenomenology to architecture however the way he simultaneously links the abstract and the concrete through the eyes of writers and poets is both fanciful and fascinating. Our shells, physical and emotional, come in many sizes and gradually expand from the simple space of a drawer and the cubby house of a child, through to the larger structure of our homes, finishing with our homeland, our nation. A snail leaves a silvery trail in its wake and I am interested in following that trail into the past in order to understand where we have been in the hope of making a better tomorrow.