Other Homes and Gardens Nicholas Folland

The Domestic Armageddon

It may sound hyperbolic, but it is nonetheless true, that to trace the evolution of the humble domestic kitchen is to chart the development of human culture. What began in our earliest days as a place of refuge and safety, grew into a site of community and exchange. The hearth or fireside now stands as a metonym for civilisation itself. It is apt, then, that Nicholas Folland’s thrillingly ambitious new installation, Other Homes and Gardens, recreates a modest suburban kitchen/dining room, as this work draws out ideas of far grander scope and import than might initially be assumed.

The décor of Folland’s fabricated kitchen is evocative of a very particular period in home furnishings, from the four-burner electric stove, to the laminex table-top, and the ubiquitous floral patterns. Combined with the title’s winking allusion to Better Homes and Gardens magazine – in continuous publication since 1925! – there is a palpable sense of nostalgia at play in this work. Folland recollects the characteristic aesthetic of late-60s to early-70s interior design with no small amount of fondness.

But this nostalgic recreation carries with it an unsettling connotation: this is a space in which time has been arrested, or at least, has ceased to pass in its normal regimented procession. The furniture tilts and the cupboard doors slam ominously. The space seems haunted by a kind of poltergeist activity, as though the room’s vanished inhabitants continue to shift and move through the space in a perpetual loop.

The audience’s first glimpse of the installation is of its bare timber construction. The precarious lean of the structure is reminiscent of Dorothy Gale’s weatherboard Kansas farmhouse, uprooted from its foundations by an immense twister and hurled down into the land of Oz; one almost expects to see a pair of ruby red slippers protruding from the improvised architecture. The audience’s approach to the work deliberately conjures associations with the backstage of the theatre, as we slip between the black walls and the reverse side of the set. We observe the work from the perspective of the invisible fourth wall, peering into something akin to a museum diorama, or a play after all the actors have fled the stage.

The artist, seeking to destabilise his audience, accentuates this sense of artificiality. Folland makes no attempt to disguise the mechanisms by which this kinetic sculpture operates, adverse as he is to trickery and illusion. The flimsy, thin walls of the structure

creak and groan under pressure from the motors affixed to the gallery walls. This sense of an art work designed to tear itself apart reminds one of Chris Burden’s Samson (1985), in which two timber girders attached a 100-ton jack slowly pushed apart the walls of the gallery, the tension increasing each time a new visitor passed through a linked turnstile. Or, of course, Jean Tinguely’s famous self-destroying sculpture, Homage to New York (1960), which tore itself to pieces on the lawn before the Museum of Modern Art. The soundscape of screeching of motors and the creak of warping timber generates an air of imminent doom.

Throughout much of Folland’s oeuvre, natural forces, formerly governed and harnessed through human ingenuity, run rampant and exhilaratingly disrupt cosy domestic scenes. In Folland’s world, torrents of water cascade from overflowing plumbing, and freezer units encase the fittings and fixtures in layers of ice. In Other Homes and Gardens, the floral pattern of the wallpaper has spread with an alarming abundance, covering every available surface, like the thorny thicket that swallows up the castle of Sleeping Beauty. Appropriately, this pattern is made entirely from thousands of individual vegetable prints. This is a reality in which the idea of the Anthropocene has been inverted, depicting humankind at the mercy of dangerous and implacable natural forces.

The creaking fragility of Folland’s structure evokes the precarity of human civilisation in the face of natural disaster. The worryingly listing walls and rolling furniture recalls Thomas Demand’s stop-motion animated film Pacific Sun (2012), in which the artist recreated the footage from the security camera in the titular cruise liner’s cafeteria, in the moments after it was struck by a tidal wave. Subtle shifts give way to calamitous side-to-side hurling of furniture. Both Demand and Folland describe natural calamities, not through direct illustration, but rather via their impact on sites of comfort and security. We don’t see the hurricane or the tsunami, but we feel its reverberations.

Nicholas Folland is the master of the uncanny domestic scene, the sense of banal reality made strange and terrifying. The kitchen of Other Homes and Gardens is at once a comfy, nostalgic space, and a topsy-turvy haunted house. What seems a humble space hums with foreboding, hinting at environmental catastrophe just beyond its shell-like walls.

-Andrew Purvis