CIVIC 2014 – Swansea PEEPS Event

“peeps“ means people, it also means to secretly look at things for a short time.

Swansea peeps has its place in the CIVIC 2014 exhibition at Mission Gallery, because the city is not just what we see in all its ugliness and loveliness; it is the place of the people – the citizens – the ‘peeps’.

Lindsay Halton   Architect – Author – Guide

I wrote the book ‘The Secret of Home’, and my main work is homesouls® – Guiding people to journey inside the psychology of their homes; to explore what they really want in life.

homesouls® is a process that developed through two decades of my work as Architect, Author and Guide.

Together with the writer Catriona Ryan I shall be taking each person on a Journey to the interior of their life and home; collecting views from Swansea people, to put them together for the CIVIC 2014 exhibition – as an inside view of the city. If you would like Lindsay to visit your home, or if you would like to talk to him at the gallery, please contact him.

There may be longing, there may be loss and there may be desire – A window can hold all these views. Our windows frame our experience of the way things are, and they can influence the way we want things to be – I can show people how to look at their windows in a new way:

Inspiration

•  A window invites poetic reflection
• A window is an invitation
• A window tells a story
• A window is about ‘views’.

Intention The digital screen is also a window through which we view the world, so it makes sense that the exhibition should be through the digital screen – A virtual window – A window to the windows of Swansea.

Illumination So the presentation will be a ‘virtual window’; reflective, provocative, an invitation, a story; a peep at the peeps of Swansea – a window looking at windows, expressing: views, snapshots, moving images, voices – A view from inside the city.

Questions. The view outside the room is framed by the window. All our choices are framed by what we have experienced and what we have come to believe.

• Who are we without our views?
• What would happen if we changed our points of view, or if we looked again at what is shaping the context of our views?

The Theme

The way you see the world is the way it is.

Change your view, then your experience will change too.

 

The Event

CIVIC runs from 12 April – 01 June 2014  at Mission Gallery Swansea

Swansea peeps week at the gallery is 20-24 May with ‘peep consultations’ and workshops all week, culminating in a walk and talk from Mission Gallery on the 24^th. May.

Lindsay will also be talking at the Health and Living Expo May 3rd & 4th 2014 @ The L.C Swansea Please contact Lindsay for more information.

Home is ….wherever I am”

In ‘Making a home’ and ‘the Art of home’ ( two recent BBC Radio 4 programs), artists consider their roots and their idea of home:

Becky Manson is nostalgic; her beautiful animated video ‘Remember Remember ‘  echoes perhaps what I have found: that home is a story we carry with us. Perhaps we want to feel at home in our story, so we try to make ourselves feel at home wherever we are.

She infers that people who move a lot also play house a lot, that; houses and flats are merely containers in which we construct our own sense of home – “a movable state we can bundle into a suitcase ready to unpack and reorder in a new location”.

Home in transit may be common now – but not where I live in Wales: A man in a cafe drops his head when talking to me – broken heart’d through a divorce settlement; he is threatened with losing the home that has been in his family for 600 years.

Author Rosie Dastgir says that for many of us home is more bound up with the Soil than Soul, and film maker Clio Barnard said her sense of home is  ‘root or wound’.

Home is both root and wound, soil and soul, for the family of the broken heart’d man. His grandchildren roll in the same soil as their medieval cousins, but as they grow up their lives will be far more transitory. Home ownership for the young is a far off challenge. How far can roots grow in a modern rental?  What Becky Manson says is reassuring; that bricks and mortar are irrelevant:  “….the moments, realisations and discoveries which occurred within these walls, are significant…..the real moving in process is a mental one”. And Rosie Dastgir says“; Our roots are a combination of many things – from our birth to our work place, where our children are born, where we live, or study, or become ourselves…….”.

Memory plays a big part in our life-stories, but imagination shapes who we are. Home is wrapped up with our identity; so what we imagine to be our limitations and our possibilities shape the choices that we make and therefore the places that we move to. But also in memory and imagination we carry the thoughts of where we came from and the image of where we are going.

Playwright Simon Stephens believes we are wired to be nostalgic and to imagine – both come from the same part of the brain. Becky Manson decided to heal a wound, so she remembered all the places where she had lived since leaving the soil of her native Scotland; she mentally moved through every property that had been her abode, visualising every door, every corner, every window; until she came to the realisation that home is perhaps – “…a feeling or state of mind that isn’t confined to one location”.

To journey through the homes of our past can be at least illuminating, and at best healing. The word ‘remember’ could here be thought of as ‘Re-Member’ .  The act of remembrance can be a process of reconstruction – Going back to a moment in time, where there is a wound, or where something in life has been broken – Going back to remember and then repair. So what do you re-member?

The window peeps not just at others, but also at you- A mirror of Self.

Are you Self-ish? By this I don’t mean inconsiderate to others; I mean seeing your-Self in others, and using other lives and other stories as a reference for what you are doing, or how well you are doing in your life and your story. The experience of seeing ourselves in others has many dimensions, and one is Envy.

When Envy is turned around, the ‘Other’, who appears to be doing better, may become a beacon on the horizon – something to aim for; so envy then becomes a positive emotion.  One of the seven deadly sins, it may well be; but seen from a different view point it can be useful for making us aware of what is lacking in our lives; it can raise the bar on what we want to achieve.

Envy in Latin ‘Invidia’ translates as “non-sight,” its blindness is close to home – a blindness to what we already have. So there are two types of envy: one that is destructive, and one that is Self-building.

In the movies and the novels, the authors and directors position the character at the window – Take a closer look at your next movie, you will be surprised at how many times this happens. We project ourselves into that character at the window, we feel his loss, we feel her sadness, and we look out at what she is after. Everything about the angle and the view sets the scene to affect your feelings.

Longing is an emotion often portrayed at the window. It is heartfelt and melancholic, lacking the prefix to ‘be’; to ‘belong’ is a natural human desire. Without the ‘be’ you have only ‘longing’ and there is a feeling of loss or being lost.

There are many emotions that can be felt at the window. The windows in our lives may seem like pictures on our walls, but the difference is that they are never finished – there is always potential for change.

In the window as in life there are some things that cannot be changed – Perhaps you can only change what is nearest to you, and maybe that is enough. In my practice as homesouls consultant, I act like a mirror, re-framing the statements that my clients make – and this is followed by the exclamation aha! A realisation of something new, or significant or profound – A change of view.

So take a look out of your window – What do you see, and how does this scene affect you? Do you feel this emotion in other aspects of your life? Now step back and take a closer look at your window, what is its affect inside your home?

If this window was a painting about your view of life, how would you change it? The great thing about your window is that you can at least dress it, and when you see what you have done, it will remind you to take another view. I have many examples of how such a seemingly small shift in perspective is followed by a profound change in people’s lives, and at the end of May 2014 I have an exhibition at the Mission Gallery in Swansea. Earlier in May I will be running workshops in both Swansea and Cardiff; engaging people to take a peep at their life through their windows.