A look into Lydia Janssen's Solo Exhibition, 'Yellow Brick Road'

What is home? A place? A sensation? Stillness? Movement? Anchoring? Detachment?

Is homeliness to be found in the vibrant now or in our memories? Or, is it all of the above?

In Lydia Janssen’s latest body of works exhibited at her solo exhibition at REDSEA Gallery, Singapore, she explores the concepts of home and homeliness.

Home can be a finite comfort zone in the midst of unfamiliarity. Or, the feeling of home might be essentialised in sudden glimpses; a scent, a sound, a feeling: elements that send you on a sensuous time travel. Back in time. To childhood rooms and neighbourhoods; the smell of your father’s study: tobacco, ink and books; forbidden and alluring, the flavour of your annual birthday cake and the saturation of sweetness when the first bite would fill your month, the musky smell of newly fallen rain in the forest of your youth, the sensation of running your hands over your parent’s velvety sofa or walking through your childhood home barefooted. Sensory memories that momentarily dissolve time and concurrently remove you from the present and bind you to it. Rootlessness and groundedness, all at once.

Is feeling at home a movement towards becoming more and more yourself? Does it involve narrowing down the essence of you to its core elements?

Home as a place associates simplicity and everydayness; it is our private sphere and the space for our most intimate feelings and activities. There is something mundane about homeliness, and the banal everydayness is also present in Janssens paintings and drawings: a naked woman examining herself in the mirror, a telephone, a fan, a television, a clock, cutlery. A home can be limiting and claustrophobic (especially when quarantined); and henceforth, the nomad life can constitute a liberating escape from restrictions and boundaries.

Our home is a multifaceted scene for privacy and secrecy as well as gatherings and celebrations. In one of Janssen’s paintings a birthday scene unfolds: a cake and a group of people fill the canvas; you can almost hear the clinking glasses and cheerful voices. The painting is simultaneously the antithesis to the intimacy of the everyday objects and an emphasis of the complexity of the layers of home.

Extracted from text written by Kristine H. Harper, Author.