Work in Progress: Ghostly Matters
I am recreating, from memory, the 22 properties I have lived in. Each house is built from the outside only, using packaging from my own daily life, including food, toiletries and medication packets. The work began with a sense of uncertainty about not having a home, and it is heading towards a gallery installation about memory and belonging, with projection mapping.
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Living with the insecurity of renting, and with the wider rental crisis, made me return to a childhood passion: making fantasy dream homes from waste card packaging. The packaging is all my own, not donated, and I use whatever fits the scale. It is a kind of recording in itself, holding traces of what I ate, took and used in each home. I’m not building interiors. Some houses return in sharp detail, while others arrive as little more than a roofline or a doorway, and I leave those thin.
The project began earlier this year (2026) with houses from my dreams, and it grew out of Institut Orphée (2011), in which I remade a nightmare about a recurring haunted house. I’m still deciding whether the dream houses will appear in the final installation.
The work draws on Susan Stewart’s On Longing, where the miniature becomes a way of holding time, and Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, where haunting is the return of what has been left unresolved. It also draws on Stone Tape theory, the discredited idea that buildings can record emotionally charged events and play them back. It isn’t science, but it is a useful poetic model, and here the recording happens twice: in the memory each house is built from, and in the material it is built with.
Quartz, the stone at the centre of Stone Tape folklore, is being embedded into the models. Projection mapping will make each surface seem to be played back rather than simply lit, flickering and never fully resolving.
This is a new ambitious, slow project, and the process is part of the work. This page documents it as it develops.
