Brooke Barnett – Fancy

The home is meant to be a place of comfort. Consider the popular idiom "Home sweet home," and imagine a warm shelter filled with delicate tablecloths, beautiful drapes and charming accents. There are blankets of down and soft feather cushions. This is a nest for sweet dreams and intimate thoughts. It is a place where family come together for communication, affection and love. "Home is where I lay my head." "Home is where the heart is." But what if the heart is a broken one? Then the home becomes a bittersweet place. Brooke Barnett explores the notion of the home and how it can begin to crumble and collapse. If we go further and look under its rugs, we can see the debris that has collected there.

As a child my home was a picture of perfection. The many houses I grew up in were the beautiful projects of my mother, an interior designer. The beauty of these shelters, like her physicality, effectively hid a psyche of intense and mysterious sadness.

We are ourselves in our homes, and like our bodies the home can be a shell to hide an identity that lies underneath. Sometimes the home is a place of extreme discomfort, harbouring the difficult emotions that also reside within us like sadness, grief, anxiety, loneliness, fear, anger and even abuse. (Brooke Barnett)

In her work Brooke Barnett examines the term "home" and turns her attention to the details that remind her of the domestic. Multilayered lace tablecloths become fragile and complex. Pillows burst with feathers arranged on the outside of ornamented fabric and the fabric becomes a canvas for the "real" image of home. Here the inside is torn to the outside and the truths and tensions of the home are drawn to light. The symbols of former shelter become irritating objects that no longer fit nicely into a cosy room. Instead they must appear in the white cube of the gallery.

BROOKE BARNETT received her BA in 2001 from Western Washington University, and she is a recent MFA graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works as an artist in Chicago.

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