Ceramic 
5 parts, each approx. 16 x 23 x 20 cm

Traditionally, the home functions as a synonym for safety, comfort, and asylum, with clearly prescribed gender roles supposedly maintaining this tranquility. Ugly Houses challenges and subverts these ideas.

The 5 ceramic houses, with their traditional form, vernacular pitched roofs and soft, faded colours appear to have been destroyed by the disproportionately large, phallic chimneys bursting through their ‘feminine’ structures. However, the gender politics, and symbolism at play here are far more ambiguous than that. Dominating the home, the chimney and stove are steeped in feminine symbolism akin to a womb and birth canal. The ‘chimney- as-phallus’s’ brutal appearance, highlights the actual fragility of its material.

These houses have not simply been shattered by the dominant ‘male’ chimney, but by outdated concepts of binary gender roles; their superficial symbolism belies the struggle of more nuanced identities. We are invited to reinterpret the chimney and stove as phallus and womb as one, ‘both’ genders breaking through the confines of the historic house that has prescribed binary genders and pitted them against one another.