A life shaped by 21 houses
I’ve lived in many different homes during my nine years in Wellington. From a shared room at university halls, where my friends scrawled messages on the backs of polaroids tacked to the walls; to our first flat with its musty smell and vinyl records piled up in the corner of the lounge; to the home I now share with my partner – prints from Māori and Pacific artists framed on the walls, protest signs laying in wait for their next outing, books gathered on every possible surface.
A home is always an extension of ourselves. The way we decorate and adorn our houses is personal, specific, reflecting where we are in our lives and what we have gathered along the way. And the places we’ve lived leave imprints on our memories. Elisabeth Vullings’ exhibition, Gehaakte Gordijntjes – Crocheted Curtains at Toi Pōneke, examines how her identity as a Dutch New Zealander was shaped by the 21 houses she grew up in.
Many works explore the cultural significance of Dutch crocheted curtains – a key feature in her childhood homes. Vullings forefronts the exhibition with an unattributed quote “If there are Gehaakte Gordijntjes in the window, you’ll know Dutchies live there.”
Growing up in Aotearoa, Gehaatke Gordijntjes became a sign of Dutch presence, and an inadvertent symbol of Dutch heritage, for Vullings. She recalls her mother hand-crocheting curtains for every house they lived in. Within her own practice, she carries on this tradition by creating crochet curtains of her own.
In the titular artwork, the Kāpiti artist uses one of her mother’s crochet curtains as a template with which to etch the cotton details into a glass window pane. The window casts a shadow, showing how these patterns can play with light. In the exhibition text, Vullings writes about how the cast shadows represent both the past and potential futures. It seems through these works, she’s coming to terms with the decisions her parents made to migrate to New Zealand, and how different their lives would have been had they not moved here.
In the far corner of the exhibition, hand-made crochet curtains are displayed on curtain rails, creating the illusion of windows and making the space itself feel like a home. This effect is re-emphasised by Vullings’ use of physical windows and doors as canvases throughout the space. They all sit on hinges, which makes it possible for the viewer to move them and see what’s on the other side.
Moving through the exhibition becomes like exploring somebody’s home. As a viewer I feel nosy, curious, but also welcome. Projections of photographs and videos from Vullings’ family archives are displayed on the far wall, and the sounds of everyday life being lived add layers of nostalgia, as well as a feeling of ‘gezelligheid’ or ‘cosiness.’
One of my favourite works is ‘Renovating’, which is a series of cyanotype prints on recycled white sheets that have been arranged as wall tiles. On each tile, Vullings has placed pieces of crocheted curtains, drawings and house ‘blueprints’ to create a series of images that seem to evoke different memories and musings about home. Often when we delve into our memories about past places we have lived, we remember small details – perhaps a pattern of wallpaper, a particular vase or wall hanging. These small fragments feel like the artist reaching back for those memories, trying to piece them all together.
Vullings’ other works are clean, geometric and architectural – an interesting contrast to the softness of the crochet curtains. She paints floor plans of houses she has lived in from memory. In one epic work entitled ‘The Shifting House’, Vullings creates a constructed timeline of all 21 houses she has lived in, from birth until today. The result is a painting where each house seems to collapse and fall into the next. It’s a shifting visual timeline of a life lived in many different settings.
With ‘Strata House’ Vullings has stacked up glass templates of different architectural elements of her current home. Each sheet of glass has a different element of her home printed on it, which can be stacked to create different compositions. Two works named ‘Alternative Future 1 and 2’ use this model from ‘Strata House’ to create different compositions, which Vullings then paints to show the implication of the different choices we make, and how they can lead to different futures.
There’s a delightful playfulness to Vullings’ works. They imagine and re-imagine what home is. Timelines shift and change, memories blur, and each work shows a progression from the other. It’s really special to witness an exhibition where the artist’’ own memories play such a key role in the creation of the works themselves.
– Gehaakte Gordijntjes – Crocheted Curtains, by Elisabeth Vullings, Toi Pōneke, to December 8. Join Vullings on November 25, at 1pm for a guided tour of the exhibit.