05-09-2025
08-06-2025
02-05-2025
16-04-2025
15-04-2025
06-04-2025
29-03-2025
20-03-2025
11-03-2025
11-03-2025
28-02-2025
21-02-2025
12-12-2024
29-07-2024
Bibilography
5th September 2025 - Interview with Amy Dowrick
- What encouraged you to create digital art installations, and find your niche through this form?
I aim to centre my art practice around a digital immersive experience with interactive artwork. My background in traditional media, combined with growing up and living in the digital age, motivates me to create art that merges physical and digital realms. Having completed a degree in Computational Arts, I clearly identify my interests in new media art to explore how images, code, and audience interaction shape our sense of identity, memory, and place.
- Talk me through the process behind creating an installation.
It starts with research and a question, then quick digital sketches such as browser/game-engine prototypes to test interaction. In parallel, I plan the physical “invitation” such as the furniture, screen, sensor or object that makes the first gesture to the audience. From there, it’s iterative: collect material, e.g. stories, scans, archives, build the interface, test with people, refine accessibility, and only then lock the install. For my interactive installation ‘Hear how you look, see how you sound’, I built a script that converts webcam images to audio, lets visitors “play” and edit it, then writes those edits back into the image file. The gallery version made that pipeline visible: a cluster of monitors, a single button, and the files slowly bruise over the run.
- Let’s talk about your most recent ‘Home is a dwelling path’ installation. What encouraged you to come up with the idea to explore the concept of home this way?
Home, personally, felt less like a place and more like a route, something you walk through, remix, and remember. It is fluid and ever-changing. I wanted to make a world you navigate rather than a set you view: a drifting landscape of rooms made from 3D scans, fragments of personal archives, and found material. Texts like Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory, Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, and Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby encouraged me toward small, carried stories over master narratives: a bed, a bowl, a corridor, the tiny containers for bigger histories.
- How did your own concept of home and your relationship with it personally affect your process when creating the installation?
Being Chengdu-born and London-based, I’m always translating between languages, cultures, and habits. That in-between feeling is in the work: nothing sits still, rooms are stitched and displayed in surreal, dream-like scapes, and comfort and distance happen at once. The “pillow talk” performance element came from wanting an intimate register for sharing, quiet conversations that can fold back into the digital space without turning people into pure “content.”
- You also have a digital installation titled Flickring Home – what is the concept of this in comparison to Home is a dwelling path?
Flickring Home is a browser-based artwork using Flickr’s public photo archive. A generic 3D room is textured live with images tagged “home” (and whatever tags a visitor adds), so the space constantly re-skins itself. It’s about collective memory and algorithmic chance: what surfaces, what vanishes. Home is a Dwelling Path is slower and more personal: consented recordings, scanned objects, and a physical anchor like a bunk bed to hold the encounter. One is an elastic collage of public memory; the other is a co-built, intimate map.
Both works are viewable and can be interacted with online via: https://flickring.casa/ and https://newart.city/show/home-is-a-dwelling-path
- Why is exploring the home so prominent throughout your work?
Because “home” is both personal and shared collectively, the idea of it is tender and political. It’s where care, culture, and power meet: who gets to keep archives, who gets to customise space, and what platforms do to our stories. Working on the theme of home lets me test the agency. Can we move from scrolling to building and from consuming to composing?
- Is there one piece that is most significant to you? Why?
Home is a Dwelling Path, for sure. It gathers everything I care about: participatory storytelling, 3D scanning, worldbuilding on the web, and a tactile anchor in the room. It also taught me to design for non-linear storytelling and mix the digital and physical realm, as the work gets better the more other people’s stories of home are entered.
- Is there a message that you try to convey with each installation?
That digital space can be intimate and handmade. I want visitors to feel permission to carry their own fragments into the work, and to notice how small choices, what we save, tag, or scan, quietly rewrite our histories.
- What exciting projects have you got lined up?
I’m presenting Home is a Dwelling Path at the V&A’s Digital Design Weekend as part of the Camberwell College of Art’s Computational Arts graduate exhibit. I’m also showing the same installation of the bed set up at Peckham Digital in October at Copeland Gallery, which I feel really honoured and excited about. Apart from that, with my art collectives, Cranberry Lemonade and Phreaking Collective, we are looking at workshop opportunities broadening out to Europe and putting up another exhibition in January next year in support of the Koppel Project.
Thank you! x
8th June 2025
I chose to present my research through a website, in a blog / journal style of writing, because it mirrors the format and logic of my practice due to its interactive, accessible, and evolving nature. As my artwork lives partially online and relies on layered digital storytelling, a static PDF or book would not reflect the fluidity of my methods. A website allows embedded media, hyperlinks to artists’ work, and a more reflective, experimental format that supports both critical and personal engagement. This aligns with the participatory, web-based nature of my home as a dwelling path.
(if it helps, read from bottom to top)
2nd May 2025 - DHS and his home sweet home
| (Hypebeast 2025) |
In my project, I’ve been thinking of home not as a fixed location but as a structure built through movement and conversation. Suh's rooms echo this fluidity. They resist finality. The viewer does not simply observe the work, but instead enters it, dwells in it temporarily, and exits changed. In Suh’s words: “These spaces are like a garment you can wear… they move with you.”
The transparency of Suh’s installation also resonates with how I use digital textures and objects as fragments of spaces that no longer entirely exist. The homes are visible yet insubstantial, much like memories carried in migration. Suh does not try to reconstruct his past, but instead builds a “transportable memory,” as one of the exhibition texts puts it. That phrase has stayed with me. It captures the friction I feel in trying to reconstruct others’ narratives of home, not to preserve them, but to let them be carried, worn, and reshaped within the digital terrain of the digital space.
What struck me most was how Suh treats home as an ongoing negotiation. His works are not static memorials but spaces of breath and transformation. I see my installation in a similar way, not as a static archive, but as a shared, living conversation shaped by each participant’s presence. Suh offers a structure for how we might build memory, not by fixing it but by allowing it to shift. His work affirms that memory is not housed. It moves. It expands. It dwells.
16 April 2025 - my bunk bed vs Tracy Emins, My bed
(Emin 1998)
When I first encountered the Turner Prize Work My Bed (Emin 1998), I was still wondering whether vulnerability could be effectively embedded into an installation without resorting to theatrics. Emin's work is raw but not performative. It is a static site of collapse, care, and chaos. In her installation, the unmade bed becomes a diary. It isn’t just a sculpture of sleep, but a freeze-frame of aftermath. I return to this work now, in the context of my own bunk bed piece, and the connection feels more than symbolic. I’m interested in the bed as a transitional site, one where bodies rest but also confront memory.
Emin's work makes no effort to aestheticise the discomfort. In my own practice, I’ve tried to preserve that honest impulse. The softness of a bed together with the personal, intimate stories of conversations offer a pause. They allow space for talk that might not unfold in a gallery context. Her infamous, controversial work of My Bed, helped me consider the politics of intimacy. It challenged me to consider what is visible and what remains unspoken, especially when the topic of home is discussed.
Where Emin’s work crystallised a private moment into a public one, I intended to allow for a shared moment to emerge in real time. Her work gave me a structure for thinking about presence, which is not a spectacle, but something to be felt, held quietly, and then let go.
15 April 2025 - Nostalgic Playground
His's maquette for Playground came across while I was researching digital-physical translations and looking deeper in his later, finalised project. The idea of digitally distorting a memory-object before materialising it in steel feels closely related to how I shape the digital fragments in Home is a dwelling path. Whether it’s a 3D scan of a room or a ceramic form built from a memory, my work also leans on the viewer to animate something otherwise inert. His proposal for a public forecourt helped me think through the importance of site, and how the same object can be experienced differently based on its context. Norfolk offers a sculptural logic that is not static, but speculative, which is what I try to embody in my own installations.
06 April 2025 — Object-orientated storytelling.
(Kaur 2023) (Kaur 2023)
Jasleen Kaur’s sculptural installations weave together cultural memory, family heritage, and collective belonging through the use of reclaimed everyday objects. In Alter Altar, the entire exhibition set up reminds me of those objects at home that don’t quite fit, yet never leave. The car becomes a container of ancestral memory, wrapped in softness, ritual, and absurdity. That softness unsettles.What draws me to Kaur’s work is her attention to the domestic and the diasporic, not as separate threads but as entangled knots. Her Sikh-Scottish upbringing is reflected in her materials: Irn-Bru resin, salvaged objects, song, and everyday rituals. They don’t explain themselves. They sit with you like a relative at the dinner table, familiar but not always understood, and the artists asks simply acknolegement and acceptance in that.
Kaur’s ability to weave personal artefacts into cultural reflection reminded me that material memory does not require grand gestures. It only asks to be held, or sometimes, simply placed.
Her work pushes me to think about how to let the objects in my own work hold more of that tension: between the personal and the communal, between absurdity and devotion. Her process of collecting, remaking, and letting things sit together in contradiction is a method I like to return to and focus on.
29 March 2025 - On fludity of home.
Some transcripts and findings in talking to friends:
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The fresh poured asphalt concrete mixed with newly-cut grass.
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A taste of humidity. A mouldy taste of the rain, when it’s wet in the air. Then the sun hits. That’s the feeling of home for me.
- A 50-50 home. The food my grandparents would cook. Multiplicity of home.
- “Home” of websites
- A wet painting that I’m scared to touch, the memory is so real to me yet home is so fake
- To connect to your childhood friends, a natural chemistry
- Where is home for immigrants?
- When I fight with my sibilings.
20 March 2025 - Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal
It also reminds me why I keep recording small, easily overlooked stories: the smell of wet asphalt, the silly memories of after-school activities, mundane cooking and being with parents. These fragments belong to people whose voices are not usually archived in formal histories. By folding them into the web space, I’m trying to give shelter to memories that rarely find a stage.
Digital spaces once taught us to build homes through code, layouts and 3-D customisation. Myspace wasn’t just a profile: it was a bedroom wall in HTML, a diary we stitched together. Most current platforms want our engagement and data, not our stories. My act of draping Polycam scans over furniture carries that same tension, carving out safety and memory where the mainstream internet no longer welcomes building. This chapter convinces me to keep treating the installation as an engine for re-imagining home, rather than a museum for preserving it.
11 March 2025 - On Homesick, Sarabande and Material Memory
A busy envening on 11 March, I also attended a panel discussion between artists and curator of the exhibition Homesick at Sarabande Foundation. The show gathered works by eleven women-identifying artists who explore shifting experiences of home, displacement and identity (Sarabande Foundation 2025). The curators describe home as something worn and carried rather than fixed, a sentiment that resonates deeply with Home is a dwelling path. Homesick dismantles what no longer fits in the home and offers a structural reassurance that home is not a single site, but a set of relations in motion. Queerness, nomadism, and posthuman perspectives were not exceptions in the show, but guiding forces. The exhibition helped me name the intuitive feeling I’ve been shaping, that home is unstable, negotiated, and co-authored.
Yijia Wu’s work stood out, not only for its visual composition but for the absurdity it embraced. In the panel, she spoke of objects as migration, and her Soap Tiles series (Wu 2023), consisting of white, translucent soaps, is arranged across a tiled grid and then ritually washed in a clear water tank. The act is absurdly simple: scrubbing homes until they vanish. Yet it lingers. The performance is not dramatic. It’s quiet. Repetitive. Intimate. What remains after rinsing is a residue that holds both presence and disappearance. It’s not nostalgia she offers through the process of shifting her artwork, but friction, which is a kind of tension between presence and detachment. I think about her question: Is grounding important, or just a myth we chase?
Wu described memory as what we forget, and her performances make that contradiction tactile. The soap tiles are literal objects of home, but they’re also metaphors for how domestic memory dissolves under time and migration. It’s not permanence but ritual that matters.
11 March 2025 - On Intimacy and 1:1 Encounters
As I shape Pillow Talk, the performative layer of Home is a dwelling path, I reflect on this performance Body-Phone-Complex. It’s not just about the digital space people explore below, but also what follows that moment of quiet reflection, when I ask them to bring a pillow and come up to the upper bunk and talk. Like Caroline and Romy, I do not promise therapy or a solution. But I offer space and moment of reflection.
Their phrasing, 'Does your phone feel like part of you?' influenced the kind of questions I wanted to ask. Not interrogative, but tender. Open-ended. With room for silence. Our objects shape us: phones, beds, screens. In my work, it's the domestic furniture, scent, or taste that holds memory, and it’s through this staged closeness that participants might begin to share their own “fragments of home.”
This performance piece solidified my belief in the small-scale, intimate performance, specifically the soft, durational gesture. It reminded me that care, vulnerability, and shared presence can be as powerful as any polished output. Even if no words are spoken, being in the same breath for 15 minutes is enough.