Skins
6-19 May 2024
Open: Friday - Sunday 12-4PM
For a duration of two weeks, Justine Hounam, the director and founding member of BOTH, will inhabit the gallery as a project space to develop her sculptural work.
Justine Hounam is both a sculptor and filmmaker based in London, and her artistic practice revolves around exploring the connections between individuals, their homes, and household objects, symbolising physical, psychological, and metaphorical aspects of 'Skin'.
Hounam's background in architecture shapes her interest in form and materiality, leading her to experiment with sculptural processes in order to innovate new techniques. Justine makes bodily sculptural forms resembling hardened shells by layering household paint onto fabric stretched over domestic wooden furniture. When removed, akin to skin pulled from a body, the fabric retains the imprint of the object it covered. These sculptures, suggestive of territory, reveal the contours and aging of the furniture within. The materiality of the objects is integral, as they contain memories, subjectivity, and personal space, whilst also having the ability to display the erosion of time and experience, which get imprinted onto cloth. Hounam sees the material and its idiosyncrasies as symbolic metaphor of skin and scar tissue.
In addition to sculpture, Hounam produces short films shot from above (birds eye viewpoint), capturing mundane daily tasks in domestic life. Through these films, she uses personal and domestic environments as a backdrop to also question broader societal and political concepts.