“Any interior is a set of anachronisms, a museum with the lingering residues of decorative styles that an inhabited space collects. Banal or beautiful, exquisite or sordid, each says a lot about its owner and something about humanity in general.”

Inspired by the interior works by Uta Barth and Vilhelm Hammershoi, Domestic Interior explores how we impose our identities onto a space to make it reflect ourselves. The unconscious desire to make a space our own is essential, providing safety and comfort. The piece seeks to reflect these moods and atmospheres of a domestic space, using them to glimpse into the lives of its occupants. As with each unique personality, a unique space is formed Establishing a preconception of their character. For this effect, the pictures were shot in a standard format and are displayed in the widely recognised symbol of a window, representing the viewer gaze as looking into the lives of the occupants of the house.

The work looks to show the beauty of domestic space, with each image highlighting a different interaction between the blank walls and the occupants’ additions. The images declutter the contemporary house, utilising empty roof and wall space to emphasise these additions and simplify the frame. Despite this, homes are still a representation of the chaotic mess of life, creating a full and information dense set of pictures. Thus, to prevent the interiors from overwhelming the viewer, simple interactions between light, the curtain, and the wall are placed within the display.

My purpose of the piece was to explore why I enjoy shooting interiors, and what to me makes the interior of buildings so beautiful. I found that it is enjoyable to make predictions of a person based off the way they interact with the space around them, and the dynamic way light projects into these spaces makes it so that there is never one perfect representation. As much like ourselves, these spaces are dynamic.