The House of Opposites collaborative project is a touring installation piece, adapting it’s form and content to each space and audience it encounters. The House, both a physical form and an evolving ideas space, is an alchemical container of creative material experimentation. It is a sculptural repository, morphing in scale, of curious, expressive parts, figures and narratives, telling shared dreams and stories and generating new stories. It currently comprises of ceramic and cloth figures, ‘buildings’, drawing, animation, sound and creative writing.
For Use and Ornament, we are proposing a House residency inspired by a ‘collection’ of miniature ’enchanted’ objects together with other donated materials (see guide attached) from local residents, responding to the title: ‘lucky totem’ and ‘Stoke: person/spirit-past/future’. Visitors will be invited to bring a small object and its story (again please see guide attached) to the Airspace gallery. Their object will be ‘collected’ by a simple pressing into a pre-made clay tablet. The tablets will then be fired to bisque, to form a sprig-mould. This collection (sprig-moulds/materials donations) will then be used to create new figures and forms. In this way, our proposal thematically connects with a number of the residency themes, including respite and refuge, alchemical processes, a space for encounter and the future city.
