Travelling Home

Travelling Home is a body of work in progress that deconstructs the colonial history of home, trade, migration and cultural belonging through a material language of textiles, sculpture, neon and sound. Drawing on Irish Traveller heritage and the deep entanglement of Liverpool's port history with the movement of peoples, goods and knowledge across the Atlantic and beyond, the work refuses to treat home as a fixed address — proposing instead that home is something carried, constructed in transit, and continuously remade.

The work moves across scales and media deliberately. Textile maquettes and fabric sculptures work at the intimate register of the hand, cloth as the knowledge passed between generations, the material that holds the body, that was traded and stolen and gifted and remade across colonial routes. Set against this, neon mobile sculptures bring the same forms  ‘house, boat, wagon, horn’, into luminous suspension, hovering between sign and symbol, commercial language and ancestral emblem. The mobile as a structural choice is itself a refusal: these are forms that balance rather than anchor, that occupy space without claiming ownership of it.

Running through all the work is the megaphone and the horn,  voice carried ahead of the body, amplified across distance. Travelling Home is concerned not only with physical movement but with whose movement has been heard as presence and whose has been legislated into invisibility. The result is a constellation of objects that are never quite still, never quite settled, and refuse to be.