Lachlan Hadley

From within the house

This year I've spent much more time at home than I anticipated. I've taken this opportunity to think more deeply about my emotional connections to the home that I've lived in for the past 18 years. It has obviously overseen and nurtured a lot of personal change through my childhood and adolescence and will now see me off into adulthood and living my own life. I care for the house and its surrounding trees and I often think of how devastating it would be if any future residents were to remove any of them. I know the ins and outs of the house; familiar with the sounds, the light, neighbours and progress in the vegetable patch. This ultra-familiarity is of both comfort and self conscious concern to me.

I have also spent a considerable amount of time as a volunteer assistant at the new public Lyon Housemuseum Galleries. Being there has made me consider the potential of my own house or bedroom as a museum or as a spectacle for visitors (as boring as that might be to experience). Visitors to the original Housemuseum (next door) learn something about the lives of the resident family as well as their perspectives of what it means to live and grow up in a contemporary city. When I was on a tour of this building I was more intrigued by the objects, books and papers the co-founder architect had amassed on the desk in his study. I certainly don't have the financial means or the passionate desire to emass a large a collection of contemporary artworks (as they have), however (like most people) I have always collected things throughout my short life. For instance, just scanning over my desk and bedroom currently, I have a collection of stones that I've collected from various trips in the country, a film currently on pause on my computer screen and some hessian cloth wrapped around a bottle (with this I was thinking about merging different shapes and textures). There is also a raku-fired vase made by a dear friend here, which is the first and only work in my acquired collection. I suppose these objects mark my interests at a particular time and embody psychology. I arrange these accumulated objects so that they hold some kind of aesthetic attraction to me as well. Perhaps aesthetic attraction is why I've been drawn to collect them in the first place. So perhaps, like the Housemuseum, in opening up my family home and my bedroom, visitors would get a somewhat autobiographical understanding of my experience of living through the objects I collect and through experiencing the architecture and private space that hold them. 

View from the entrance of the public galleries
looking towards the original (private)
housemuseum

My desk

This topic will be something that I keep looking into and expanding on.  There is probably a lot of theory out there that I ought to seek out as well- so I'll keep writing on this and related subjects as I read more and more.  This, from Memo Review (https://memoreview.net/blog/lyon-housemuseum-galleries-meow-by-paris-lettau) was a good thing to read.  It puts the Housemuseum Galleries in context with other current museological trends in Melbourne- galleries in sharehouses, sheds, etc. 

It's a brave and vulnerable thing to open up your home to unknown visitors and it isn't something I would ever feel comfortable with doing.  It does feels too personal, and a bit too self obsessive if I was to do it myself.  If anything I'm more 'at home' sharing the odd image on this blog of various details of my experience of the house for readers to see and judge for themselves.

My desk- from a distance- with the detritus of things I've been working on recently