Transcontinental empathy:
Jeanie Finlay’s strangely fascinating installation Home-maker.

Wouldn’t most people be sorry to live by themselves when they could be living with a partner? Not Roy. He loves solo living because it means his ex-wife isn’t with him: the ex-wife, we learn through Jeanie Finlay’s strangely fascinating installation who roy refers to as a “street angel but a house devil”.

Despite that, one gains the feeling that Roy is probably still in love with his ex-wife, Perhaps that’s why he keeps the portrait of this attractive woman in his living room. And it’s evidence like that which makes this man’s protestations of liking for a solo existence all the more poignant.

But there’s a lot of poignancy in Home-Maker, which consists of two adjacent 3d living rooms set up in Djanogly theatre. One room is English and one is Japanese, both decorated in with the living-room bric-a-brac of their respective cultures. In both, visitors use a mouse to navigate through an interactive film exploring the lives of seven housebound older people, four of them in Derbyshire, the other three in Tokyo.

The founding idea is that somebody’s home tells the story of their lives. Or as Jeanie Finlay says “If you ask someone to tell you the story of their life? Then it’s very difficult to get anything out of them. But if you say, “tell me about the wallpaper that you have bought…” they’ll happily talk. Older people, especially if they have moved from a large house to a smaller council house, have their whole lives reflected in the stuff in their living rooms. So by looking at their rooms, you’re looking at their lives and the stories in their lives”

Jeanie, who lives in New Basford, has long been interested in the “little stories” which make up the big picture through Ruby the digital arts company she runs at Broadway media centre.

Home-maker itself started life as a website which, thanks to a canon International digital creator’s web award, led to a commission to expand it to Japan. Jeanie, having learned Japanese, the Tokyo side of Home-Maker was created and the complete installation began a four venue tour that began in Lancaster last year and ends in Newcastle upon Tyne next February.

It’s thanks to Jeanie’s interviews and digital interactive work that one is able, using the computer in Home-maker, to pan around the modest homes of such elderly women as Florrie, Lilian and Aiko-san, who talk about their late husbands and the meaning of te various objects which they surround themselves with. These are all perfectly ordinary lives, but no less interesting for that; indeed, you sense strongly that is what Home-maker is really all about – a quiet celebration of the quiet dignity to be found at the centre of a life if only one cares to ask the right questions. At the same time, it also touches the meaning of “home” and the similarities and differences between people of different cultures. Florrie and Lilian for example, reveal that everyday they talk to the photographs of their late husbands; thousands of miles away, in Tokyo, Aiko-san, who likes to photograph clouds, does the same with the image of her late husband.

Such poignancy verges on an unexpected sense of tragedy when one learns from Jeanie that, of the sven interviewees four of them have since died. Only Roy with his double-edged sentiment to his ex-wife, still lives at time of writing.

Home Sweet Home, Mark Patterson, Nottingham Evening Post, September 9th 2005