TEN ENGLISH HOMES

Ten English Homes is a box of screen print cards that was produced to accompany a window installation titled Homes. It was originally made for Cornerhouse Manchester and shown there in 1991, going on to show in a shop window adjacent to the Bluecoat Liverpool as part of a mixed Bluecoat show called A Pool of Signs in 1992.
The sheet of ten cards was printed in such a way that I got a print too, just by changing the stock from card to paper and continuing the run. The imagery is adapted from illustrations found on food packaging, being produced at the time to sell dairy products. Much of the landscape imagery seemed to me to be particularly talking about the gently rolling hills of Southern England. I felt that the imagery was being used to sell a nostalgic notion of farming and the countryside, they seem to hold a pastoral paradise that possibly never was.

To emphasise the graphic two dimensional printed imagery, I also included trim marks and colour swatches as part of the work which can been seen on the boarders of the cards. These are printers marks which are normally trimmed off or concealed within the glued flaps of packaging.

I took four of these designs and printed them up larger on to sheets of card that were folded to create four sided boxes with the top and bottom missing. The idea for the installation of supermarket style pyramids of these hollow boxes was to make something both large, loud, colourful and jolly but at the same time entirely empty.

I remember as a small child looking at a display in a sweetshop window of a giant bar of chocolate. I must have commented on it because I was told that it was a fake bar made of wood and just for display. I do remember being both fascinated and disappointed!

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