HOUSE House

What makes a house a home? While two spaces may appear identical, the difference might lie in the capacity for a home that has been lived in, physically touched, to encode and retain memory – the smells, patterns, feelings and recollections that accrue with habit. The senses of touch and smell have a particularly strong physical relationship to emotion and memory, and we say something is ‘touching’ when it emotionally impacts us. Over time, memories can form their own architecture.

After Dan Stockholm’s father passed away in 2013, the artist initiated an action that reflects on the physicality of touch and acts of mourning and memory – the results of which are assembled in his installation HOUSE (2013–16). The installation includes documentation of an action during which Stockholm, over the course of three days, physically touched the complete outer surface of his father’s red brick home. After the final square inch was touched, Stockholm began making a number of negative plaster casts of his hands performing different gestures. HOUSE comprises a forest-like arrangement of steel scaffolding bars, known as standards, on which the cast negatives of Stockholm’s hands are mounted using steel rods, The scaffolding standards recall not only a house, but also the supporting structures of memory, and the way it is constructed and reconfigured through time or distance. Stockholm’s plaster casts bear the red prints of hands and fingers in various positions, like silent gestures standing for the ineffable act of mourning.