Project Rationale - 2nd draft

I haven't posted the first draft up here, it was too unwieldy but am posting this version which may be subject to change if John or Richard see it tomorrow.

My interest in the domestic interior arises from my curiosity about people and the everyday objects with which we choose to surround ourselves.
The ten photographs of kitchen sinks exhibited here are all contained in the same terraced row, one of those sinks is mine. What I find interesting about juxtaposing them is that superficially, they are all equal – same sized and shaped house, same location but each is subtly different and this is down to choices exercised by the occupants of the house. By looking at the photographs I would hope to stimulate people’s curiosity about these absent occupants, and more broadly, about the nature of human relationships both with and within the domestic setting.
The Kitchen is the symbolic heart of the house. It’s where we get on with the everyday business of living; we relate the events of the day, we eat, clean up, argue, laugh, and cry (imagine this soundtrack as you look at the empty kitchens). The sinks are in a state of waiting, like a stage waiting for the play to begin, they wait for ‘their’ people to come home from work or school. The sinks are an impartial witness to the dramas of people’s lives. I don’t necessarily mean ‘life and death’ scale dramas, even a seemingly minute event might affect someone’s equilibrium and becomes the drama for that day.
The association of kitchen sinks and drama emerges from the British Social Realist movement which has its roots in the 1950s and blossomed in the 60s. This movement spotlighted working class culture, even glamorised it. The legacy of plays like Look Back in Anger, films like Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, and famous documentaries like Cathy come Home can be detected now in our favourite ‘soaps’. Such cultural ‘products’ explore the compelling moral issues of the day and in so doing, catalogue the changing nature of society.
Our emotional response to art often arises from personal identification with some aspect of the subject and with regard to the second piece of work on display, these are photographs of kitchen objects or vistas that drew my “emotional” attention. Apart from opening a window on the “domesticity of strangers” there are particular objects that prompt contemplation in their own right.
“Objects gain a new aura merely because they are selected and isolated, and looked at again with new eyes. The act of choosing to focus attention on them changes what they are, or how you perceive them.”
What unites both pieces of work, apart from the obvious kitchen theme, is that they are both about people without actually featuring them.
There is a selection of digital and medium format work on display. I used ambient light hoping for a more atmospheric representation of the interiors.

(quotes are referenced as footnotes) both from Ideal Home - A detached look at modern living