HOME sweet HOME, 1999
Commissioned installation, Liverpool Biennial "TRACE" UK
graphite rubbing on cotton, pins, timber
variable dimensions

Exhibited at the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, England. 23rd September- 7th November, 1999.

This work eventuated as a response to my visit to Liverpool in May 1999.

When the former Bluecoat Hospital was suggested as a site for a work I began walking around Liverpool noticing references to the great wealth upon which this city was founded; the movement of people and materials- slavery, migration and trade. I initially became engrossed in researching the transportation of people to Australia- convicts and the forced migration of children. However, I found myself drawn, somewhat unexpectedly, to the children in the Bluecoat Hospital (orphanage) who stayed behind. The Liverpool Archives holds diverse references to the Bluecoat Hospital, and also to the Ragged Schools and the Kirkdale House of Correction last century in this city. Brief tantalising glimpses into a short life of hard work. Children in the Ragged School in Soho Street, Liverpool "sorted senna and pig bristles" whilst children in the Bluecoat late last century "made pins"...The orphan boys in the Bluecoat Hospital were expected to set sail on the Slave ships and Traders which were run by several of the Bluecoat Board and Benefactors early last century. Girls were trained to be domestic servants, if they defied this expectation they weren't provided street clothes to leave the premises.

In wandering the city, I stood searching the cityscape from the top of the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral and saw the cemetery below. I walked down through the stone-tunnelled entrance into the underworld-like quarry  burial-ground of selected inhabitants of the city last century. Stone after stone inscribed with the names of Ship Captain's and their ships, of dearly beloved and departed young children eulogised in terms of permanent angelic sleep. In the midst of repetitive notions of love and family I was stopped hard in my tracks by the sight of six stones in a row, damp and nettle fringed they unemotionally named-as-lists one hundred and twenty-two dead children from four Liverpool Orphanages: The Bluecoat Hospital, The Liverpool Infant Orphan Asylum, The Liverpool Female Orphan Asylum, The Liverpool Boy's Orphan Asylum.

I felt that these stones were the answer, the reason for my extended walks in and around the city. I imagined them immediately as soft pillows, as mattresses, as a comfort that they never had in reality. I returned to the headstones shortly after with a huge bundle of cotton fabric and a large graphite rock from the Liverpool Museum to rub and transfer the Bluecoat children to their former site, and the other children to a similar Orphanage site to which they had also experienced. This activity occurred over six wet and windy days- with accompanying unexpected vital meetings with cemetery locals and visitors. At this point I decided that soap should also be an element within the work. I had been to Port Sunlight and seen the influence of Lever on the region, and the unacknowledged origin of palm oil as a major item within the cargo of Slave ships, and this connection with Bluecoat (yet again).  Lavender scented soap mix utilising Lever LUX and lavender oil was applied to the base of the pillar in this installation. This represents both the lack of mother and home comforts in these children's lives, and  visually expresses the metaphorical bar of soap upon which this building's foundation and framework was based.

Upon my return to Hobart, Tasmania in late May I constructed small "beds" for these pillow/mattresses; the size of the actual tombstones. My mother, myself and three obsessively compulsive women worked continuously over two moths to complete the intensive pin-work required.  I believed that these names must be filled-in with pins - pin cushions within only the pin-heads visible as an act of recognition and remembrance of these children's short lives; the dots as a form of punctuation - as full-stops. Making this work seemed to be an appropriately similar activity to the endlessly repetitive work which the children's tiny hands endured as pin-makers, and as such perhaps a fitting acknowledgment.

I initially wondered, as one local Liverpool man, Ian, questioned  "If people will search for and recognise their own surnames?"  But things were even closer to home than that - visitor's to the room began speaking the names of the children aloud as they read the pillows, invoking their presence and return to the very site where their names had been the everyday over 100 years ago. They filled the gap of time with voice. Seventy kilograms of pins later, and with enough stuffing for 90 regular pillows - the work was en site, the children were brought back in from the cold to the Home that wasn't so sweet for them...