A home from home for artist Harriet
Long distance walks are tough enough, but Harriet Hill is walking to her childhood home in mid Wales wearing a huge, yellow, costume/sculpture that double as her overnight accommodation.
The month long walk began from her home in south east London on June 22 and will end in Powys, her childhood home, on July 25.
En route she is talking to people about what the word Home means to them and how that has been affected by the pandemic.
Her interactions will be recorded and edited into a film to be exhibited alongside the costume in a group show in Helsinki this coming in September.
As she journeys, Harriet says she is exploring how her childhood experience of moving from urban South London to rural Wales in the 1970s made her feel both an outsider and at home in the two locations.
With funding from a National Lottery Project Grant from Arts Council England, Harriet will be accompanied each day by a walking companion.
Her route passes through Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and finally into Powys. As she walks.
She is also stopping off for day residencies at several arts centres including the About Face Theatre Company, Leominster; and the Sidney Nolan Trust, Presteigne.
Harriet’s costume is made from yellow canvas over a bamboo and fibreglass frame mounted on a pair of bike wheels. Inside the word is everything the artist needs to make home for the month of the walk - from a pull-out tent to a solar charger.
The visual artist's work has been selected for Politics in Art show at MOCAK, Krakow 2022 and she was commissioned by Art in the Churches in 2019 to create an installation in rural Yorkshire. Details of other work and exhibitions can be found at harriethill.co.uk.
She said: "Home is a potent word, particularly now with Brexit, the refugee crisis, rising homelessness and the impact of Covid lockdowns. It can mean a place, a physical structure, a deep emotional bond or an
absence of any of these. For me, wearing this unwieldy costume is an absurdist personal and political act; a visualisation of liberation and ties, the burden and comfort and feelings of belonging and isolation that home can be.”
You can find out more on harriethill.co.uk/home-ing.
