The House of Opposites takes inspiration from artist Leonora Carrington’s painting, The House Opposite (1945), responding to her themes of the alchemical transformation of the domestic sphere. It also draws from our collective memories of childhood play and the childhood dollhouse. It was specifically designed as an installation working with the architecture of the Bookshop Gallery Space at Dean Clough Gallery, Halifax. The final work consists of a ‘magic box’, multiple miniature figures within ‘buildings’, projection, sound and creative writing.

Carrington was connected to the Surrealists in her early years and our figurative compositions loosely reference their Exquisite Corpse game - the blind swapping with a collaborator of a drawing, folded, then passed on for the adding of further body parts to create a new figure. In this project, we developed this idea through making. Our fragments in textile and ceramic were made separately, posted to each other, then later pieced together, creating new and strange forms. Whilst retaining some tropes of traditional doll production, such as piercings in clay for attachment to textile, our fragments challenge functional and safe boundaries of Occidental doll-types and spaces. They reference diverse bodies, complex relationships and happenings, opening potential narratives for the viewer…