Remaking Home: Creative Practice as Part of Domesticity’s Changing Significance

ABSTRACT

While the home has a history of being overlooked as a site of great social impact, this is clearly shifting as it becomes a site for diverse and significant social participation. Technological connectivity is reshaping the household towards an increasingly public life, remarkable for a domain that until relatively recently had been thought of primarily in terms of privatised care and leisure. This article brings together literature from creative industries, feminist and new domesticity fields with empirical data from interviews with home-based creative practitioners to generate insights into new work models, the coincidence of paid work and unpaid care work, and creative work at home as a locus for connecting to surrounding communities and natural environments. These lived examples are explored as signs of an altering domestic space where paid work and non-economic values are more balanced and the home itself is moving from the periphery towards the centre of social life.

KEYWORDS:

• Home
• domestic creative practice
• new domesticity
• productivity
• public/private spheres
• Creative practice

We’re experiencing an era in which the home is shifting its social value and character: in terms of public interest not only in domestic spaces but also, importantly, in the ways in which we inhabit our homes (Gregg 2011, 39-55; Taylor 2015; Luckman 2015, 1-3; Matchar 2014, 3; Scott and Keates 2004; O’Connor 2017; Saunders and Williams 1988). With COVID-19 rapidly accelerating a transition that has otherwise been building over many decades, social understanding of domestic spaces as diverse and interesting to the wider world has heightened. This is particularly so with the technological capacity to publicly share personal lives (Abidin 2014; Calfas 2018; Hunter 2015; Kennedy et al. 2020; Scott and Keates 2004) and a deepening of the global north’s fixation with lifestyle (Lewis 2008; Raisborough 2011; Martens and Casey 2016). These changes stand out against the sustained attempt to split life into private and public spheres that characterised industrial-era capitalism and which, particularly since WWII, framed the home as a peculiarly female space (Felski 2000, 86; McKeon 2005). In being feminised, the home was also seen as populated by ‘low-value’ activities extrinsic to the marketplace, politics and cultural life (Felski 2000, 8; McKeon 2005; Bratich and Brush 2011; Padilla Carroll 2016; Scott and Keates 2004). The demarcation of supposedly independent public and private realms tended to not only underestimate the value of activities performed at home, but it also shrunk the range of these as well – for women it was seen as a space for affective labour (Hardt 1999; Oakley 1985; Huws 2015; Barrett 1988) and for men, leisure and ‘clocking off’ from the outside world of work (Cowan 1989). This separation has always been artificial and contested by a range of voices who have fought to bring attention to the integral role the household has always had in economic functioning (Best 2021; Waring 1988). However, it is the cultural and political success of ‘splitting’ spheres that now seems to be giving way, such that the home is commonly understood as a more complex space – as diverse, productive, and compelling, if also conflicted and problematic (Gregg 2011; Gurstein 2002; Hochschild 1997; O’Connor 2017; Luckman 2015, 1-3; Padilla Carroll 2016). It is clearly interdependent with the rest of the economy (Gregg 2011; Luckman 2013; Taylor 2015) and where once they might have been considered surplus to civic participation, formerly private lives are increasingly integrated into our public identities (Scott and Keates 2004; Raisborough 2011). These changes are significant in reprising an underappreciated site whose goings-on can now be understood as of value in and impactful on wider society, as the home becomes increasingly central and co-constituting within the broader social body (Padilla Carroll 2016, 52–4; Luckman 2013; Matchar 2014; Bratich and Brush 2011).

It’s the varied productivity now seemingly intrinsic to contemporary homelife that is a central point of interest here, and creative practice in particular as a good example of one such type. By taking a closer look at home-based contemporary creative practices we can gain insight into how these behaviours are part of a larger reshaping of the home’s perceived function and value.

In this article, I draw on material I gathered during a collaborative art project undertaken in 2020 to make observations about the shifting function and status of the home in contemporary life.¹ In the following sections, I explore several themes that arose during conversations a colleague and I filmed and presented publicly during an art festival that exemplify the muddied ‘separation’ of social spheres. In this project, we were inquiring about the topic of creative practice at home, which is relevant here in a number of ways. First, the cultural and creative industries are a rapidly growing trillion-dollar global economic sector (OECD 2021, 4; Luckman 2015, 1) that offeri prominent examples of ‘self-actualising’ work models increasingly adopted over conventional workplace ones (Taylor 2011; Luckman 2013) and which are reconfiguring the role of the domestic space in modern-day working life (Kramer and Kramer 2020; Reid-Musson et al. 2020). Extending from this, creative work at home is often highly intermingled with domestic life generally but particularly so with care work, due to it often being performed by women, largely freelance, fragmented, and requiring much flexibility (Taylor and Littleton 2012, 32; Taylor 2011; Gill and Pratt 2008; Luckman 2013, 263). Its propensity to ‘boundary cross’ within domestic spaces (Conor, Gill and Taylor 2015, 14; Taylor and Littleton 2012, 32–7; Taylor 2011; Luckman 2013, 263) means home-based creative work challenges discrete, restrictive categories of roles and behaviours within the home, particularly those placed on mothers – although it’s acknowledged that this can also create tremendous strain for women.

Other themes of interest that arose from our empirical work surround the possible greater sociality of domestic creative work – which Bratich and Brush (2011) argue creativity has a unique tendency to foster – as well as work from home as a locus for reconnecting to the surrounding environment. As a final point, we consider words spoken in one of our conversations that stand in stark relief in the way they describe home within Indigenous Australian traditions. In them, we heard a clear sense of the home’s importance and centrality within these traditions, its embeddedness within the natural environment, and its sociality mixed with meaningful productivity. With this and our other descriptive examples, the article pursues this special issue’s interest in how the contemporary home is transitioning in social status and meaning, through an intimate, innovative research approach into the lived experience and nuance of this. By taking a look at this detail, we can learn more about reframed domesticity, which, while no doubt incomplete and beset by difficulties, can nonetheless gesture to the political and social potency of its rebalanced status in the world.

While ‘creative practice’ is a notoriously expansive term, here it is used to refer to labour that generates new aesthetic content or products that may or may not involve remuneration but crucially that are intended for an audience or market outside the home. It is therefore distinct from a hobby or similar activity primarily for personal interest. This article will consider literature on creative industries and its social impact (Taylor 2011; Taylor and Littleton 2012; Conor, Gill and Taylor 2015; Luckman 2013, 2015), and feminist literature on creative work at home, as well as literature on new domesticity that examines creative work as part of an altering private realm (Padilla Carroll 2016; Matchar 2014; Bratich and Brush 2011). By interspersing this scholarship with elements from my own creative work, I seek to focus specifically on the changing status of the home with an inclusive, experiential exploration of the impact of home-based creative practice.

Methodology

For this article, I draw on a blend of qualitative interviewing with creative practice methodology. The art project referred to in this article was one conducted by myself and a colleague Helen Mathwin. The project itself was a public installation of an urban projection space as part of the Get Lost arts festival in 2020 in Castlemaine in Central Victoria, with funding support from the local council. The projected material shown explored the home and its connection to the creative practices of eight individuals, most of which were conversations between participants, my colleague, and myself. For these conversations, we sought as diverse a group as possible of creatives, artists and makers in the regional area. Six of these identified as female, one as male, and one non-binary. Discussions sometimes spanned several hours and were conducted in situ in participants’ homes/work spaces to also allow observation of the behaviour and environment being discussed, and hopefully seeing some creative work taking place in real time. These were video-recorded with the final creative installation in mind and then analysed after the event for themes.

Creative practice methodology allows for inclusiveness in research materials used to gather data, such that creative works and more ‘plurivocal’ interactions might be mined for insight, including the use of aesthetic and sensory material alongside the spoken word (Haseman 2006; Batty and Berry 2015). The use of images and descriptive reflection is also in keeping with dialogic qualitative interviewing techniques, allowing for ‘the visible (what is seen), the auditory (what is heard) and the sensory (what is felt)’ (Denzin 1997, 38; Borer and Fontana, 2012). The dialogic approach also reflects the free-flowing, relational format of our conversations (Denzin 1997, 38). We wanted participants to shape a significant amount of the direction of discussions, although we still used prompts to return to key themes and queries. We pursued an up-close, intimate sense of making creative work at home, while at the same time showed interest in broader issues such as participants’ ideas and ideals of home. This included connection to place and how all these ideas interacted with their creative work. We asked them not only about the pragmatics of how they managed their arrangements, but also how it helped resituate these spaces as productive hubs from which to engage with the world.

The Creative Home

The growing economic sector of home-based creative work has been attributed to a more profound cultural and economic shift away from mass-scale production towards economies of individualised, responsive, and ‘authentic’ goods and services (Luckman 2013: 254–5; Howkins 2018; see also Taylor and Littleton 2012: 2). The opportunity to make creative work has expanded rapidly with this demand, alongside the evolution of technology and work culture to support working from home (Gregg 2011; Miller 2007; Luckman 2013, 2015; Padilla Carroll 2016; Kennedy et al. 2020). The emerging domestic creative economy might be understood, then, in terms of a shift in both our models of consumption and production. Luckman suggests applying Adkins explanation of ‘organised’ industrial economies – under which we have mostly wanted to purchase and own goods – tending towards advanced capitalism’s ‘disorganisation’, where the market permeates the most common, personal, and un-corporate spaces of everyday life and where lifestyle, identity, and cultural capital are the more desired ends (see Luckman 2020, 38–9; Adkins 2005).

Along similar lines, the self-actualisation argument suggests that creativity was always going to become intermingled with modern work ideals due to the human need to have free personal expression as a goal for labour, especially in a post-Floridian era where creativity and self-actualisation are closely linked (Taylor 2011; Luckman 2013; Howkins 2001; Taylor and Littleton 2012; Gill and Pratt 2008; Florida 2002; McRobbie, 2011; Huws 2015). Taylor’s ‘contemporary identity project’ (2012, 5) here combines with the need for women in particular to have flexibility, often leading them away from office or studio settings to situate their careers at home. For Taylor and colleagues, this choice carries risks which women may not be aware of, discussed below. Arguments emanating from the new domesticity literature, however, see the intermingling of creative work with traditional home-based settings as a promising shift in social power and value for the home space and its occupants who up until now have been undermined in their social influence (Padilla Carroll 2016, 58; Matchar 2014; Bratich and Brush 2011). These arguments observe that a new more visible role for the home has emerged as it increasingly becomes the locus for people to enact their civic participation (Soper 2004: 112; Lewis 2008, 9). As the choices we make at home become more infused with our values, the choice to work at home, in this case, helps to reconfigure the home space as of the world and in the world. In turn, the value and status of traditional domestic activities, such as relationship work, care work, and housework, also become more socially relevant and impactful (Padilla Carroll 2016; Bratich and Brush 2011, 236-7).

New Ways of Working

Despite the increasing professionalisation of women, the struggle to make conventional work models fit with care obligations and an awareness of their structural inequality led to some women ‘opting out’ of the office and work altogether in the early 2000s, and now to what Taylor calls ‘the new mystique’ of freelance or self-employed work from home, particularly so with cultural and creative industries (Taylor 2015, 175–7; d’Arcy and Gardiner 2014).

When we met Cassie, a magazine-editor-cum-ceramicist, in her tiny studio in her garden, she seemed very confident about all the drawcards Taylor describes regarding her decision to leave the city with her partner to work from home. Her studio was incredibly quaint, glass-panelled French doors, linen aprons, modernist clay vases … The greater freedom, control, efficiency, and convenience sounded too good to pass up, as well as a utopian mix of paid labour intermingled with everyday life.

I get to work exactly how I know I like to work … I think in terms of the output of work, I’m maybe even more efficient, and [have] more time and opportunity to explore ideas because I literally can go here [into the home studio] and just go ‘oh there’s an idea I have’ and just quickly mock that up while it’s fresh in my head. Whereas if I was probably back in Melbourne, you know, it might be a 20-minute drive to the community studio, and late at night it probably wouldn’t even be possible to do that … There’s almost nothing in my way of me coming here and being myself, I have nothing to inhibit that … Everything in this [space] is designed by me … Especially during lockdown, I’ve spent a vast amount of my time here. I have a kettle in here, I don’t even have to leave … [Of the home and the studio] it’s all just an extension of me, it really is.

Cassie offered a ringing endorsement of the appeal of home-based work, which is part of the mystique Taylor says is drawing more people to leave the workplace. Certainly, Cassie’s practice appeared to be doing very well; however, scholars like Taylor are concerned that this type of success is the exception rather than the rule. Taylor argues the precarity, isolation and marginalisation of these types of workers within the neoliberal economy is a real concern, and that women are particularly likely to be drawn in and caught up in these types of conditions (Taylor 2015, 178; see also Dawkins 2011). She notes that the romanticism and promises of creative work at home – as compared to the reality – can exploit women who are prepared to ‘tolerate difficulties and uncertainty’ due to reduced options (Taylor 2015, 174). This is not to mention technological and digital barriers, resource restrictions, and barriers to child care, material tools and physical space, and so on (Dawkins 2011; Gurstein 2002, 16; Luckman 2015, 87-111). Taylor describes:

… [a] discursive drift [that] is neither the ‘fundamentally masculine’ (Ahl and Marlow, 2012) figure of the successful entrepreneur nor the masculine artist but a novel, feminized (though not inevitably female) figure, who works on a small scale, mostly alone and from home, motivated by the hope of self-fulfilment and freedom as alternative rewards to a steady income and secure employment. (Taylor 2015, 174)

The draw of working from home remains strong, however, which as mentioned above, refutes the idea of the space as inactive, unproductive, or neatly parcelled off from public life. McKeon’s historical work provides a broader perspective, arguing that any categorical sectioning off of the private realm has actually been part of the West’s project of social modernisation. This, he says, can be understood as an economic as well as ontological drive for Western culture’s abstracted, hyper-rationalised, and masculinised dominion over the material world. In this context, the home was too closely bound to personal, embodied experience and therefore has needed to be excised from collectively held ideals (McKeon 2005, xix–xx). In this way, a neatly separate private sphere can be historicised as a modernising fabrication, and while domestic life traditionally may have been somewhat distinctive from public life, McKeon argues it was not separate from or outside of it (McKeon 2005, xix-xx). ‘Like labor, the public and the private are thrown into distinctive relief against what had been a relatively homogenous plane of existence and has become a heterogenous landscape of semiautonomous structures’ (McKeon 2005, xx).

Care and Other Productivity

Work based at home has for a long time had negative associations for women (Taylor and Littleton 2012), ‘de-professionalised’ due to its location. However, as we see the clear division between public/private fall away, so too are the boundaries ‘shifting, morphing, even disintegrating … [between] home and work; paid work and unpaid work; production and reproduction’ (Conor, Gill and Taylor 2015, 14). When we sat around the kitchen table with Hermione, a photographer and artist, the conversation turned almost immediately to the daily interlacing of work and family in her house. The vintage pine table not only had the paint splatters and grooves of a workbench, but also coffee cup rings and saucepan marks, as she explained it was her studio as well as breakfast area. The background were kindergarten-style watercolour paintings of the alphabet sticky-taped to the wall and a freshly wiped sink. Motherhood, she explained, had pivoted her working life away from theatre production and the city towards work that could be performed in the same location, sometimes simultaneously, as caring for three children. It has meant reorganising the way she uses her home and her expectations of how and where she will produce work. There was lament in Hermione’s voice as she explained:

I think I would feel really strange if I went to a studio … Well I couldn’t go to a studio in the evenings to make my work … because my littlest is three so I will never be able to have a studio … 

This speaks to the lack of mobility women often experience, in terms of place and space, after having children (Alesina and Giuliano 2010; Charlesworth, Baird and Elliott 2014, 4), but Hermione also notably conveyed pride, even excitement, when describing her decision to reclaim her home and surrounds as a workplace, as well as inspiration and subject matter:

But at the same time … [working at home] has really informed some of the work I’ve made … A lot of the early works we were making, if we couldn’t get what we wanted from home, it was about going for drives or walks at night and shooting stuff in the local landscape so you weren’t far from home if one of the kids woke up and needed to be breastfed or something.

This entanglement of tasks and integration of care work with professional creative work in Hermione’s life sounded extreme, challenging, but also like a thrilling combination. Women can be nurturing their babies while shooting artwork at night? It taps into the freedom narrative of creative work, where particularly for women, the recombination of unpaid reproductive work and ‘self-actualising’ paid work has been described as the utopian goal (Huws 2015). But also utilising the home and the everyday as a subject matter as well as a professional location, is a subversive reclamation of it as an entity worth studying, whose goings on are interesting and relevant (see Bratich and Brush on the unheimlich [2011, 237]; Burton 2019, 1332).

Jewellery maker and artist Selby also spoke evocatively of her unwillingness to relegate parts of herself: ‘I mean with children, and life, and art, and all of the things you need to maintain – relationships … There are so many expectations that are individualised onto each [of these aspects of life]. [But] you need to keep the things that keep you alive going too.’

For Hermione and Selby, there seemed a purpose in reprising motherhood, particularly at such an intensive phase of rearing small children, as a role that can and should co-exist with labour on projects for the world. Taylor and Littleton (2012, 138) contrast this with more conventional thinking on the world of work as something that exists outside the home as a ‘non-work site of personal life and relationships’, as depicted in conventional sociological texts for example (see Burkitt 2008, 143; also Marx 2016, 110–11). They argue that creative work is particularly suited to overriding these distinctions due to the personalised nature of the work, especially when there is a pre-existing sense of greater importance to public life (Taylor and Littleton 2012, 110–11). Both Hermione and Selby spoke of the symbolic significance of enacting this productivity for their children to see and understand as ‘normal’, despite the challenges of doing so. The interplay between demands sounded rhythmic – or spasmodic – and demanding, giving us a sense of the tensions involved. It is obviously still a process that Hermione felt necessary to justify:

When I’m heading into presentation or exhibition mode, basically my work takes over the entire house and basically everyone else gets pushed aside, so there may be some enormous, half-built sculpture on the kitchen table and just for that week or whatever and the kids are eating breakfast in another room! [My art] for so long just exists in the background and then coming to crunch time it will dominate whatever space in the house is needed to make it … I think I feel a lot of guilt when it’s happening in my house, because, you know, I won’t be as neat and it’s just a really clear representation of what my priorities are at that time, which I feel guilty about … but at the same time I wouldn’t want it to be happening anywhere else. … [The kids] definitely notice [my work in our home] but they’re also quite excited by it. But also I get quite tense because of course they’re curious and want to touch things and investigate and I want to stop them doing that! So I feel like it certainly makes my adrenaline a bit higher. [laughs] But I also like that … 

As Selby sat at her family’s dining table skewering tiny squares of black leather as part of her fabric bust of a human head – textural, wild, and yet quietly contained – she spoke of the mixing of her roles and tasks within her home. It was clear that the muddying of boundaries was something she felt was ultimately positive for her three daughters to see and experience:

[My 3-year-old daughter] Sunday helps me with the threading of my leather, [5-year-old] Marley likes to chop. I mean, it obviously slows the process down. However I think witnessing outside materials and ideas … Art is a really informative way for them to express themselves at a time when they are little and they are learning to develop a language of their own and how they see the world. I know that it has been really positive for them to just witness it. They don’t really ask me about what it is but they … ‘Oh no, not another exhibition!’ [laughs].

Whether accidental or planned, this type of domestic environment is one where parental and particularly maternal work can introduce children to the wider world and, ideally at least, begin unifying the idea of a mother at once working and caring. This is not to dismiss the difficulties and at times extreme stress this undoubtedly places on women. Selby nonetheless seemed clear that it was progressive in shaping her daughters’ understanding of women’s capabilities from within the home space:

But they get really excited about it, it’s like there’s definitely a level of … like they understand there’s a process involved with the exhibiting and making and doing … But I don’t want them to suffer also because of my practice so there’s an inclusion that happens – I’m hoping – with the domestic and the creative. Because I do think they can … I’m getting better at getting them to work together.

In this, we can see a feminist project to redefine domestic spaces and everyday life that takes place there as a platform upon which progressive politics are lived out (Luckman 2015, 144; Padilla Carroll 2016, 52; Jeremiah 2006). Second-wave feminism has been accused of participating in the subordination of the home by advocating women ‘repudiate’ housework and domestic life in pursuit of equality through the workplace and worldly pursuits (Martens and Casey 2016, 34; Felski 2000; Giles 2004; Jeremiah 2006, 22, citing Beauvoir 1972; Firestone 1979; Friedan 1963). Some contemporary scholars identify some older feminist thought as inadvertently supporting a hierarchical valuation of social zones; where, as Felski observes, it too ascribes values of mobility, dynamism, impact, and intellect to the wider world (like the Lacanian symbolic order) and the home becomes a ‘quasi-uterine space’ of stasis, dullness, and ahistoricism (Felski 2000, 86; Martens and Casey 2016, 35). Jeremiah describes a feminist ‘recuperative’ impulse from the 1970s that has sought to reincorporate domestic life and motherhood into a ‘poststructuralist feminist perspective’ allowing for multiple subjectivities with regards to mothering and for the home to be ‘diverse, multifaceted, and shifting’ (2006, 22; Padilla Carroll 2016, 51). One way is through the ‘spatial phenomenon … [of] creatively building businesses around the sociospatial routines of daily childcare’, suggests Ekinsmyth in her work on mumpreneurism (Ekinsmyth 2012, 2). Taylor says on the topic: ‘the key space would seem to be home as the double site of living and earning’, as part of the ‘humanisation’ of work in prioritising, or at least elevating, non-economic values (2015, 177).

Homes Surrounded by Other Homes

Our conversations brought up other activities that might confront twentieth-century depictions of the nucleic and passive home. Several participants described a greater sense of connection to the surrounding community resulting from their creative work being at home, with the drive to forge social ties. Bratich and Brush have enthusiastically written of the revival of ‘village and community’ through domestic creative work because they say it to some extent reappropriates both the means and relationships of production. That is, sole creative producers based at home are not only often self-employed but also often highly likely to elicit collaboration or at least networking (Bratich and Brush 2011, 234; Luckman 2015, 85; see also John-Steiner 1992). Domestic spaces used for creative practice, they say, invite more opportunity for social connection, not least because of the way these situations can reinstate older, often pre-capitalist methods and modes of working while at the same time being digitised or digitally enabled to some extent. This is the idea of the home as a hive, as inherently social spaces connected and facilitating relationships with the surrounding social context.

Collaboration and strengthened local networks as a result of home-based practices were a thread throughout most of our conversations. In several cases, it was women embarking on projects with other women so their partnership could accommodate care responsibilities. In others, it was making work while involving the family, or creative practices evolving to incorporate more contact with neighbours and the local township. When we sat in Klare’s cosy dining room, we drank tea and listened intently as she told us her story of moving to regional Victoria. A poet and performance artist, she had us captivated as she described the 2011 floods in the region and how that both shaped her creative work and forged a stronger connection to the people living around her:

[Y]ou know when you move to a place and you kind of hide and you just kind of watch the garden grow so you know what to plant wherever, and so yeah I’m like that … and then suddenly we did lose everything in the floods and I nearly lost my son as well so it was quite full on. But I actually pretty much met, I think, everyone in town … and so there’s really amazingly good positive community-based activities that occur out of these kinds of events … 

Klare set up several locally based creative projects that listened to people about their experiences of the floods, creating soundscapes and a singing performance using people’s words. Her description of these processes is ‘expanded listening’, a device to tap into an ‘expanded collective experience’. The conversation we had with photographer and artist Jessie also brought up how situating a practice at home, combined with the pandemic in 2020, intensified their desire to forge ties with their local neighbourhood. They described the way being embedded in the physical location of a community and working drove them to get out and meet neighbours to offer mutual aid to anyone nearby in need.

It’s interesting that during COVID I found more connection with community and more people around … Just finding out, like, ‘Oh I live on that street’, ‘Oh I live on that street’, and just the process of slowing down, there’s more of a collective sense of care. That’s been created during this time, being able to see people more one-on-one … 

Research on the link between working at home and a sense of embeddedness within a surrounding community is uncertain, and the digital nature of much home-based work as well as the use of online communities does not mean experiences like Jessie’s are the norm. However, Gurstein suggests such work models can create greater community stability with diminished need for worker mobility (Gurstein 2002, 120). For Bratich and Brush, the important shift is the political dimension of reuniting domestic spaces with sociality, so the home can perform functions that don’t fit within a capitalist rationale. Of the groups of people coming together in their homes, particularly women and particularly surrounding creative activities, they say it has been ‘[s]een as idle work, a waste of time, and unproductive activity from the perspective of capital and masculinized value’ (Bratich and Brush 2011, 240), and so urge its reclamation to resist such dismissive assessment.

Homes Within a Natural World

‘Home’ is of course often more than a dwelling, but embedded in a surrounding environment and therefore a point of connection to a physical landscape. This was a consistent theme in our conversations. Artist Eliza described her art practice and her native grass restoration on a large property in regional Victoria as virtually indistinguishable in their sense of purpose. A complex mix of family and cultural history and aesthetic and environmental connection have for twenty years kept her ‘magnetised to this place’. Jessie also spoke of the way working at home has facilitated a connection to a physical and environmental location, which in turn continues to shape the nature of their work. They describe how creative work can insist on the artist becoming familiar with their environment, as a part of a sharpening of one’s senses and a slowing down and listening.

We sat in Jessie’s backyard studio, admiring the tall gums of the national park that neighboured it. The morning air was still and beautiful and studded with bird song:

When you’re an artist and you’re a photographer, you know, you are responding to what’s around you and I think everyday you’re noticing changes. You’re noticing the birds and you’re noticing the animals and it becomes very much a part of your work. Like here [gesturing to a desk], we can hear all of these birds, and this is crown land at the back here, it’s an old mining site, these are dams left over from the Royal Gully site that’s at the top of the hill. And I don’t know, I think it just naturally becomes part of the work. If it’s not necessarily literally part of the work it’s very much about how I’m experiencing the landscape and the place I’m at.

Environmental psychology has long grappled with the complex interplay between creativity and natural environments to suggest, for example, that attention within the creative process can be externally moderated by the natural setting (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989), in affecting and redirecting the brain’s functioning and creative responsiveness (Williams et al. 2018; Atchley et al. 2012; McCoy and Evans 2002). Such literature explains that creativity does not take place in a vacuum, and indeed, many of the people we spoke to spontaneously brought up some kind of sense of simultaneous disconnection or at least awkward awareness of making a home in Australia given the dispossession of its original custodians. All acknowledged it as a troubling part of making themselves ‘at home’, and described the small, daily ways they faced up to this unsettledness: acknowledging it in conversation, preserving and restoring native plants and vegetation, active observing, respecting and learning about the area in which they live, for example.

One conversation we had was with Ron, a musician and maker of Indigenous artefacts. He invited us into a mudbrick bungalow at the back of his bush property and we were riveted by his stories of making. Much of what he described in his making practice showed compelling connection to place and landscape as well as a clear priority of people and tradition over the made object itself. Rather than the modernist history of abstracted value of a thing, he described making as seamlessly joined to being in a landscape, a community, and a home:

Ron: Most of [the making process] is the history [rather than the maker or the object]. … And I make that important, I make [the Indigenous boys I teach] know that. I’m handing it down to you but you’re going to hand it down to your kids and then your grandkids will learn. So it’s that oral tradition.

Susie: So you’re not the owner of it … [the making process, the knowledge, and the object]

Ron: Spot on. Caretaker.

Ron spoke of evenings with his family and community coming around for music and making together. Home as he described it was inseparable from being part of a larger family and community, and the land and ecology they are tied to. But home was also intrinsically a place for working with your hands, acts that resonate and are vital in the larger social tasks of storytelling and passing on knowledge, wisdom, and tradition. The home sounded like a synthesis of many different but connected functions, and certainly more than exemplified the vibrance, activity, and relevance of a re-awakened domestic space discussed here.

The other thing I learned was how to etch. When I was little we had an amazing artist in our community called Uncle Sam Kerr, he was probably another one that I would sit and watch, and he was a funny old guy, he used to carve emu eggs with a knife. Four of his eggs are in Buckingham Palace, that’s how good he is, the best in our community, and there was another guy, Hilton Walsh. But you’re just sitting around listening. So the etching part which is burning wood, I picked that up from him, sitting and watching him, and my dad making boomerangs, and we get together, and when my uncles came over they all made boomerangs and all their kids could throw them so we’d have massive big competitions that were pretty serious down on the lake. … [In my home growing up] all the materials were there [in the local environment] to work with, and my aunty … and my nan, they were full on artists, they would make feathered flowers – you couldn't tell the difference between real flowers and their flowers … My mother was a Tatiara Ngarrindjeri from South Australia, so her nan wove baskets with that style, and they were seen as the best basket weavers in Australia … So all around me was these amazing artists. And again, sitting and watching, that’s the Aboriginal way of learning.

Conclusion

Rather than a static concept and social entity, we can see that the home is always shifting – as much about ideology as it is about household behaviours and practices (Lacouture 2019, 1278). Recent decades have produced technological and social conditions that now emphasise the home as a site of varied productivity and as a platform for people to contribute to civil society – counter to ideological constructions of a private realm cordoned off from the wider cultural, economic, and social world. Home-based creative practice is a useful example of emerging trends in work choices, and here I’ve drawn from creative industries, feminist and new domesticity literature to explore some of the ways it is helping to reshape domestic spaces. This is also while making use of empirical material I collected with a colleague as a blend of creative practice methodology and dialogic qualitative interviewing. These methods pursue an inclusive use of aesthetic material and incorporate aural, sensory, and visual information when performing and analysing interviews.

We can understand the increase in home-based creative practice as a shift in the nature and location of economic activity, as well as the pursuit of work that fulfils individual ideals of creative potential. New domesticity analyses are useful in emphasising the redefinition of domestic spaces and occupants as integral, active elements within wider society, and insisting on the revaluation of home-based creative work and traditional domestic activities. Our conversations with artists and makers brought up issues surrounding new work-from-home norms and their advantages like flexibility, convenience, accessibility, and control. However, it is also acknowledged that these same traits can create significant problems for women in particular who often seek out this work, potentially leaving them in difficult, marginalised positions. We encountered examples of creative work mixing with domestic care work, out of necessity but also as a reclamation of mothering as a diverse and mottled role, and we heard about the tensions and rewards of demonstrating this for participants’ children.

It has also been argued that home-based creative work revives the potential of the home as a hub for socialised productivity, collaboration, and connection. We encountered many examples of this in our conversations, involving family, partnerships, and the surrounding community. Here again, domestic spaces are being reconfigured away from restrictive ideas of private sanctums towards those of it as alive with activity, connection, and potential. Likewise, we heard about home-based creative practice generating opportunities for connection to the surrounding environment and engaging and grappling with participants’ sense of geographical place. Creative work and inhabiting a location were not disconnected factors in most of the stories we heard, bearing out research on the ways the two interact and affect us as mediating entities.

Through our conversations and considering the literature, this article has sought to give some detail to the example of more modern, creatively productive domestic spaces. It presents this micro-level information as a way of supporting the claim that the home is changing in the ways it functions but most importantly in how its value is rebalancing when compared with the idea of the traditional ‘real world’ of economic and cultural activity. There is some promise in this that as traditional work is humanised somewhat by being situated at home and often altered by relational, social, and geographical embeddedness, so too will the value and impact increase of previously devalued non-economic domestic goings-on such as care, relational work, and connecting to the broader community and environment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Mt Alexander Council.

Notes

1 This research was conducted under RMIT University ethics project number 2020-23526-11806 within College Human Ethics Advisory Network (CHEAN), College of Design and Social Context (DSC), NHMRC Code: EC00237.