Making Our Domestic Relics

My mother and I bond over our favorite genre of art, which is, broadly, anything to do with domestic life. Every week, secondhand diaries, letter exchanges, memoirs, or novels of family and interior life arrive in recycled packages. We laugh over Ginzburg’s father’s dialogue in Family Lexicon and the tense exchanges in Buddenbrooks. When we finish, these homey reads find a comfortable place in the living room, where they settle beneath their visual counterparts on the walls: a bird’s-eye painting of a family room, a deconstructed picture of a house, and a photograph of a ceramic egg cup hung beside one of a milk jug. Even my own framed drawing from eighth grade is a pop art rendition of the black currant preserves we use at breakfast.

Our pull toward these scenes derives, I think, from a fundamental human inclination toward the home. It is the place where we spend the vast majority of our lives, where we are formed and most exposed, where our earliest comforts, habits, fears, and instincts attach themselves. Because so much is linked to our domestic lives, it becomes difficult to separate who we are from the spaces we have inhabited. As such, portraits of domestic life inspire something very particular, inviting us into the sacred closeness of another person’s interior world. Despite its distance, that world often begins to feel deeply familiar, because it draws out something just as immediate from our own.

With this in mind, my mother and I went to see Domestic Relics at the Saatchi Gallery during the brief time we were in London. The exhibit, bringing together eight artists working across painting, sculpture, and textile, focuses on domestic spaces and objects, and felt quite aligned with our own sensibilities. 

Occupying two large white rooms just inside the gallery’s entrance, the space is expansive, but the works do not read that way. They are small in scale or close to their subject matter, often defined by texture and color that evoke a sense of recognition in the viewer. Despite their different media, the works are cohesive and showcased intentionally: a garment is suspended from a clothes hanger, another piece drapes like a curtain, and most remain unframed altogether, bound closely to the walls. This dissolution of clear borders softens the distinction between exhibition and room, such that each work is physically likened to an object in a home. In turn, the space itself takes on the character of a room actively lived in.

While each piece serves its own material and spatial function within the exhibit, the works that most anchored my experience of the exhibition were primarily those by Jennifer Jones. Jones’ keen use of texture and material permeates the rooms—through fabric, upholstery, curtains, and even raw wood, her works take on a lived-in quality that recalls the comforting spaces of the home. In an interview with University of the Arts London, Jones describes that she draws from family photographs across generations, “collage[ing] them together to create invented scenarios which are simultaneously real and imagined.” Her work indeed operates as a kind of collage, in more than one sense: each image is assembled from fragments, but those same figures and scenes traverse pieces into new settings to create altered yet preserved works.

“Embroidered Grandad” presents itself as Jones’ most focused image: her grandfather reclines in a white armchair, enveloped by flowers, his eyes closed and arms folded. Contained within an embroidery hoop, the work brings out a tactile sensitivity. As the scale and delicacy of the stitching draw the viewer into a more intimate, almost private encounter with the work, the distance between viewer and maker seems to narrow. The fabric itself has not been removed from its frame; with this comes the sense that the image may still be in the midst of being worked. In this way, the piece moves away from mere imagery and toward something functional, closer to the fabric of a home. 

This tranquil image is carried over to the second room. The same picture of the grandfather is stitched directly into the coarse upholstery of a couch, now accompanied by another man and a television as fragments of a room form around him. The image’s miniature scale renders it convenient to be overlooked, absorbed into a surface that is already worn and used (a shirt and skirt are strewn casually over the cushions). And yet the sewn image holds the eye, exuding a gentle warmth upon an otherwise unremarkable piece of furniture. The figures sit within it as though embedded into the surface itself, perhaps ingrained through years of occupation. Here, Jones alludes to the way the spaces we return to hold the traces of our lives. Just as this family’s everyday scene etches itself into the spirit of the sofa, we dissolve into our own domestic worlds, shaping them as they inevitably shape us. Even their most mundane elements become distinctly ours.

Yet Jones’ world is not all dreamy recollection. In another work, the same image of her grandfather is painted opaquely on a raw wood panel, its grain and imperfections showing at the painting’s sides. No longer encased in the precision of embroidery, the detail of the work has diminished, leaving the grandpa suspended in a blurred field of green. In the image’s recession from its wooden backing, we feel what might be Jones’ memory lapsing, grasping at morsels of the past. This might be the reason her grandfather only comes to her in a singular image, repeated in slightly warped forms yet never truly changed. 

In two other works, cast on hanging curtains, scenes of domestic interiors—a television, a chair, a crib—appear in near photographic detail, yet crucial figures are partially cut away or obscured to leave gaps in the image. These works destabilize the serenity of earlier scenes, echoing the distortions of memory suggested in the previous work and exposing undeniable gaps in the reconstructed past. This recalls how Jones explains “we might look back on a difficult childhood, for example, with nostalgia, fragmenting and rose-tinting the past.” Even as we recognize the ways our lives become embedded in the spaces we inhabit, the past does not return to us intact. Rather, both by the slipping nature of the mind and the narratives we ourselves choose to form, we stumble upon it in discontinuities. In reconciling these, we make our own domestic relics. 

Beyond Jones’s recurring worlds, other works in the exhibition turn toward more understated subject matter. One sculpture by George Richardson presents a clay telephone mounted on the wall, roughly formed and unglazed, its base curving as if shaped directly by a human thumb. Other works fix on similarly mundane details: the patterned carpet of a corner where one room gives way to another, a window with curtains drawn. Hazy paintings in pastel hues, blurred faces, crayon-like strokes. Taken together, the pieces carry a certain unpolished quality that mirrors the worn comfort of the home.

In the absence of clearly marked titles or artist names, there is something compelling in the way pieces aren’t strictly tied to their authors—any image could belong to anyone, reflecting the certain universality of the home. This allows the viewer to decide, in some regard, where the meaning lies. The works which speak most to me are those which feel most personal: I love Jones’ grandfather series because he strikes me as uncannily similar to my own, and because the textures of her works remind me of those in my own home. Yet the open framing also leaves in the air what is most personal to Jones herself; in the vagueness, we also miss out on the particular lives, relationships, and moments behind each canvas.

On the Saatchi Gallery’s website, the description of Domestic Relics ends with the claim that these works gesture toward “the uneasy-but-beautiful ways in which personal history becomes myth.” For all the artists’ intimate portrayals and the works’ deep-rooted sense of lived experience, the line feels like a cheap abstraction. The pieces don’t suggest ‘myth’ at all; instead, they stay grounded in something far more specific. Rather, the artwork dwells on the tangible and intangible ways that our personal history—in its joys, ruptures, and contradictions—asserts its own existence in memory and art. In this way, it breathes through the objects and surfaces near us without ever losing its attachment to the lives that produced it.