Where the Heart Is

2014
Neon Sign


Install dimensions approximately:
80cm H x 1250cm L

Images: © Tim Etchells

Comprising a fragment of the idiomatic phrase ‘Home Is Where The Heart Is’, Etchells’ permanent work commissioned for the Algernon Firth Building in Leeds opens up layers of meaning and association in the context of the site.
With its imaginative conjuring of the word ‘home’, the work points to the new use of the building as accommodation, a place where students will make their first independent homes away from family. Meanwhile, with the literalisation of the partial idiom suggesting a kind of basic anatomical instruction or information, the work also refers to the old purpose of the building – as part of the hospital, and as its Institute of Pathology.
As well as these layers, Etchells’ work also functions as a kind of open question, independent of the building’s past or present. Proposing a concrete location for an important symbolic part of our lives, Where the Heart Is nonetheless leaves its actual co-ordinates open to imagination. Indeed, reading the phrase we are encouraged to wonder in our own terms, where we think the heart (of things, of our lives or of the city) might really be.

Where the Heart Is was commissioned by Rushbond and managed by Project Space Leeds.

About Tim Etchells’ neon and LED works
Etchells’ neon and LED pieces often draw on his broader fascinations as an artist, writer and performance maker, exploring contradictory aspects of language – the speed, clarity and vividness with which it communicates narrative, image and ideas, and at the same time its amazing propensity to create a rich field of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Through simple phrases spelt out in neon, LED and other media, Etchells strives to create miniature narratives, moments of confusion, awkwardness, reflection and intimacy in public and gallery settings. Encountering the neon sign works, in the streets of a city or in the space of a white cube gallery, the viewer becomes implicated in a situation that’s not fully revealed, or a linguistic formulation that generates confusion or ambiguity. As often in Etchells’ work, in the neons the missing parts of the picture are as important as the elements that are present. Invoking a story, or projecting an idea out-of-context, the work invites us in, but into what exactly we can’t be sure.