‘House Works’, 2020, HD Video, 37 minutes
The politics of the interior of the house – as both psychological and physical space – are lacking in historical accounts of modern architecture. In the trilogy of films Emily made between 2014 and 2018 about three modernist homes in East Anglia – two of which were lived in by their architects – she tried to counter the overwhelming narrative of the heroic aesthetic icon by attending to the quietly radical ways these buildings were inhabited.
In her films of H.T. ‘Jim’ and Betty Cadbury-Brown’s 3 Church Walk in Aldeburgh, Suffolk (1962), John Penn’s Beach House in Shingle Street, Suffolk (1969) and Richard and Su Rogers’ Spender House and Studio, near Maldon, Essex (1968), Emily has constructed alternative readings of space and ways of life that were culturally connected, creative and unconventional. The stories of each house are embedded in the surfaces, objects and materials found within the domestic interior; reactivating these spaces lost to architectural history, the films express aspects of the potential stories held there.
Emily Richardson is an Artist, Filmmaker and Researcher whose films explore the nature of our relationship to personal histories and the spaces we inhabit. Her films have been shown in galleries, museums and festival internationally, including the Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, Pompidou Centre in Paris, Barbican Cinema, London, Anthology Film Archives, New York and Venice, Edinburgh, BFI London, Rotterdam and New York Film Festivals.
Instagram: @emilyrichardsonfilms