Dan Miskimmon

“Silence lays steadily against the wood and brick of Deramore Drive, and whatever walks there, walks alone.”

11th of August 2011: He’s isn’t here anymore. Are we here anymore? The house feels different now; like a stranger, but one you almost recognise. A building now vacant, encountered in a dream, but one that you feel like you’ve been in before. From the outside it’s almost like a living, breathing, hostile animal. From the inside; a chaotic cacophony of eerily familiar patterns and objects. This isn’t home. Isn’t he here anymore?

After losing my father my home quickly transmuted from a seemingly innocuous space into an overwhelming, defamiliarised and discordant evocation of what Antony Vidler terms the domestic uncanny. This body of work exists as a very personal and subjective meditation on familial grief; centrally employing the interior and exterior archiecture of my family home. The work adopts the genre of ‘The Haunted House’ as a lens through which to understand and explore the relationship I have with my home post-losing my father. The narrative similarities between my work and the genre include employing traditional horror iconography such as ‘the dollhouse/miniatures’, as well as gothic horror aesthetics. In summation, my work posits how trauma can linger where we leave it. Namely, how loss can attach itself viscerally to a domestic space which in turn challenges our predisposed notions of the home as a tranquil sanctuary. In truth, when we lose a family member – we lose our home.