THE HISTORY
JUSTINE HOUNMAN
Justine Hounam's artwork investigates notions of childhood, single motherhood, domestic violence, gender, territory & race, as depicted (often with humour) by the body, the home, architecture & rural landscape. Hounam interprets these themes through different but related processes of ‘making’, using found objects, personal possessions and traditional ‘manufacturing’ methods.
When making work, she often un-picks the so called ‘traditional’ roles of men and women in order to critique lack of valuation of women's experiences. Hounam dismantles & re-assembles antique objects such as a writing desk or her grand-father's clock and reconstruct them using multiple media. Such constructs (of inherited clock and writing desk) are, for her, overly-masculine, material constructs relating to men's dominance, meaning that women's experiences are not equally valued.
In re-assembling objects, Hounam often reproduces objects, or fragments, using the process of slip casting, (fired and unfired clay slip). This creates a multiplicity of casts, e.g. vegetables or furniture. She often juxtaposes these with observations of the (rural) landscape, to generate dialogue between, e.g. the outside, the home and the gendered body.