Artist Statement
The Architectural Uncanny and The Animated House
We live in a global age of increasing uncertainty and economic instability. Currently we live in a time where whole communities are being dislocated, homes and families lost. This instability has brought into focus the transient nature of our urban experience and the sometimes fragile foundations upon which our homes rest. Often in my work you will find houses perched precariously on stilts or undulating floorboards where the ground is always shifting, threatening to give way. In some of my works I create miniature worlds that suggest anti-monumental spaces that are contradictory yet intimate and float between fiction and reality and the realms of physics and metaphysics. The idea is to invoke a sense of connection as well as estrangement. Informed by ‘The Architectural Imaginary’, my work plays with spaces that are normally familiar to us and challenges the way in which we perceive and relate to the urban environment to form new ideas and an intimate meaning of home. We are conditioned to identify unconsciously with our environment and we ‘animate’ our buildings (houses) unknowingly.
Stephen Nova 2016
The Architectural Uncanny and The Animated House
We live in a global age of increasing uncertainty and economic instability. Currently we live in a time where whole communities are being dislocated, homes and families lost. This instability has brought into focus the transient nature of our urban experience and the sometimes fragile foundations upon which our homes rest. Often in my work you will find houses perched precariously on stilts or undulating floorboards where the ground is always shifting, threatening to give way. In some of my works I create miniature worlds that suggest anti-monumental spaces that are contradictory yet intimate and float between fiction and reality and the realms of physics and metaphysics. The idea is to invoke a sense of connection as well as estrangement. Informed by ‘The Architectural Imaginary’, my work plays with spaces that are normally familiar to us and challenges the way in which we perceive and relate to the urban environment to form new ideas and an intimate meaning of home. We are conditioned to identify unconsciously with our environment and we ‘animate’ our buildings (houses) unknowingly.
Stephen Nova 2016