Research and Scholarly Activity

Steve McDade - Moving House

The exhibition is a re-combining of older and new work to find equivalents for different associations connoted by the term ‘moving house’. Sifting, sorting, discarding, finding, wrapping, boxing-up and shifting. This is an act of remembering, of re-combining physical objects with time and space. A re-membering; putting together to make new memories.

The image of the staircase is central to the idea of moving through the space of the house. It is a liminal space an in-between space. Neither up nor down, it connects all parts of the house from the lower to the higher floors. From cellar to attic.

“Verticality is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic, the marks of which are so deep that, in a way, they open up two very different perspectives for a phenomenology of the imagination. Indeed, it is possible, almost without commentary, to oppose the rationality of the roof to the irrationality of the cellar.” (Bachelard1994, The Poetics of Space Boston;: Beacon Press)

The binary opposition of lower with higher, up and down, enables us to make connections with transformations of physical and psychological space and with the notion of transcendence.