Haus: Everything is A Short-Lived Experience

Solo Exhibition at Hope 93 Gallery, London. March 13th- April 17th 2025.

"Das ist die Sehnsucht: wohnen im Gewoge und keine Heimat haben in der Zeit. Und das sind Wünsche: leise Dialoge täglicher Stunden mit der Ewigkeit."

(“That is longing: To dwell in the flux of things, To have no home in the present. And these are wishes: gentle dialogues of the poor hours with eternity.') From Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Motto," which appears in his collection Mir zur Feier (To Celebrate Myself), published in 1899.

What is reality? The philosophers say it is the study of existence, the nature of things as they are. But in this case, the reality I face is the fact that I will probably never own my own Haus. So, instead, I chose to construct this one in my artist studio which is located at the end of my parents garden.

When I was four, my grandad, Peter Gillbanks, built me a Wendy house in my parents’ garden. He was a signwriter by trade, and above the tiny wooden door, he hung a plaque that read Emily’s. My mum stitched pink-and-white gingham curtains for the Perspex windows. Inside, I had a set of beige and green wicker chairs, a table, a space to draw.

By the time I was six—the same age I am in the self-portrait included in this exhibition—my parents bought me a dolls' house. It came with simple wooden furniture, but my dad transformed it. He used wallpaper samples, leftover tiles, scraps of carpet, and the same paint from our own walls to make the miniature house a replica of the one we lived in. A house within a house within a house. A frame within a frame.

I have no doubt that the way I played as a child shaped me as a painter.

I recall that my mum’s birthday one year, my dad helped my brother and I make a cement cake—thick, heavy, topped with glazed brown wood chippings, a perfect replica of a chocolate gateau. I wonder now if that was the moment I learned that things are never quite what they seem.

Play is powerful. And I suspect my ontological urge to both question and loathe reality stems from how I first learned to navigate the world. The Wendy house taught me how to connect, how to construct, how to carve out a space where I belonged. It also taught me that no house is ever truly yours—it exists only as long as you are inside it, believing in it.

These blank canvases, this project, are the same. They are the surfaces onto which I project the unfolding of my modern life. The spatial computing elements allow for interaction, for participation—for visitors to become, if only briefly, the dolls inside my Puppenhaus. It is a way of seeing behind the scenes—of revealing my working-class family at home, not as a static image, but as something fleeting, something performed.

A house is never just a house. It is a threshold, a theatre, a memory waiting to be inhabited. And perhaps that is what I have built here: not a home, but the longing for one.

The first philosopher I ever read was Martin Heidegger, and after that, I could never look at a brick the same way again. No longer just a lump of baked clay, it became an onto-phenomenological crisis. How did I know the brick was there? Was I truly perceiving its essence? Was the brick, in some way, perceiving me? And beyond that—what does a brick do? A brick can be used to build walls that keep people out, to set the boundaries of privacy, to contain and institutionalise, to construct places of power and worship. Each brick, in its given context, defines not only space but the way we move through it.

I actually read Heidegger’s friend, Rainer Maria Rilke, before I read Heidegger. To me, Rilke is Heideggerian philosophy in poetic form. While Heidegger made me question the function of a brick, Rilke made me feel its poetic weight. Yes, a brick is a building block, but it is also the means by which a Haus comes into being. For some, to build a Haus is to create a home—a place to dwell, to belong. But what happens when you do not feel at home, even within walls of your own making? This is Heidegger’s unheimlich, the uncanniness of not feeling at home in the world. Yet, unlike Heidegger, I suspect Rilke would remind us of the dual nature of things: the same brick that builds a home can also sink a dead body.

Unfortunately, I own neither enough bricks to build my own Haus, nor the necessary moral flexibility to explore their alternative function. Still, I often wonder what would happen to me in either scenario—rooted in stability or lost in submersion. I have never even owned a bookcase, so the idea of owning a house remains a fantasy. But from all the books I’ve read and borrowed from public libraries, I know one thing for certain: my Haus is my mind, and my mind is my Haus. And though my mind-Haus is structurally unsound, full of unfinished renovations and occasionally inhospitable, at least the rent is free. And so I paint—because painting allows me to live in my Haus on my own terms, haunted by past versions of myself that only I know exist.

It was this idea of dwelling—of constructing a space both real and imagined—that led me to build Haus as an installation in a gallery space. The idea came from my master’s research into 14th-century painted rooms, particularly Andrea Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi in the Ducal Palace of Mantua, Italy. Also known as the Camera Picta, Mantegna’s frescoes create an illusionistic room, depicting the Gonzaga family in everyday life. Each wall reveals a scene, a day in their world, as if the room itself is a container of their lived experience. I wanted to create my own version of this—except instead of noblemen in silk robes, my version explores the disjointed, glitch-ridden experience of modern connectivity. Or, more accurately, modern disconnectivity.

We live in an age ruled by people who are as stupid as their smartphones tell them to be. And my phone—my portable glowing extension of self and world—constantly informs me of my being-in-the-world. How many steps I’ve taken or not taken. How many people have swiped right on me or left me in the void. How many emails I’ve read, ignored, or let build up until they devour me. How long I’ve spent doom-scrolling and, worse, how long I haven’t spent doom-scrolling, as if neglecting my existential despair is just another thing to feel guilty about.

According to modern life-science (and my own fraying nervous system), my mind cannot keep up with what my phone is trying to tell me, leaving me in a state of biological stasis—trapped between presence and performance, between existing and simply being observed. Haus is an interior-theatre set of short-lived experiences, my home. Recollections of how space was once computed, and occupied by people that only existed for fleeting moments in each room—like the things that show up on my screens. My home is a round-the-clock stage set. My home is my theatre. My home is where the science of my life plays out.

If I knock, the door opens, and I’m left standing on the threshold of past, present, and future versions of myself—yet still quantifying the architectural facts of my childhood houses, the conversion of a house into a home. The home is an active moment in both time and space, shaping identity that doesn’t really exist. We move between spaces constantly. The home is a microcosm. A collection of traumas bound by walls. Every house is a House of Chiron. A place of paradoxes: private yet social, refuge yet prison, love yet labour, shelter yet site of unspoken grief.

Sometimes, I want to be set free, but I also want to be taken home—to have a drink with a past version of myself. I want to close and lock myself away, but I also know I cannot heal if I do not keep the doors open.

I cannot react to everything I see when I’m living through technological vessels. So I catch myself asking: do I really want to sit surrounded by bricks I own, only to sit and stare at a screen? If my Haus is my mind, then I should be constructing something I can actually live inside. I can use the integration of new figurative painting and spatial computing to my advantage. To question what it means to paint from life today when screens have become synonymous with vernacular accounts of vision. What happens when we relive past moments in the present, isn’t that the spatial crux at the heart of painting? To have the ability to navigate space and time.

And that’s why I paint—because painting, at least, lets me build a world I can stand in without waiting for a push notification to tell me I’m there.