Gill Perry

In this groundbreaking book, Gill Perry looks at the vital role that islands play in contemporary visual arts. She shows that in response to urgent issues such as the climate emergency, migration and colonial and gendered histories, artists have created compelling and provocative works that resonate across continents and colonial archipelagos. Perry navigates landscapes of the British Isles, Ireland, the Caribbean, Pacific Oceania, the Atlantic Ocean and the Galápagos, drawing on desert island myths and insights from Island Studies. From the 1970s to the present, she illuminates imaginative strategies of representation and metaphor in installation, multi-media and film projects by renowned artists including Robert Smithson, Lisa Reihana, Roni Horn, Rodney Graham, Tacita Dean, Karen McLean, Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon, Isaac Julien, Alex Hartley and Cornelia Parker. Taking into account diverse perspectives, she offers us a profound journey through artistic explorations of the island theme.

‘There’s no place like home’; ‘safe as houses’; ‘home is where the heart is’: ideas of the house and home are rich in cultural clichés and contradictory meanings. Playing at Home explores the different ways in which artists have engaged with this popular everyday theme – from ‘broken homes’ to haunted houses, doll’s houses, mobile homes and greenhouses. The book considers how issues of gender, identity, class and place can overlap and interact in our relationships with ‘home’, and how certain artworks disturb our comfortable ideas of what it means to be ‘at home’.While other books have touched on examples of the ‘uncanny’ and surreal presentation of houses in art, this one argues that an understanding of the role of irony and play, and the critical potential of the ‘everyday’, are equally important in our interpretations of these intriguing works. The author draws on the work of philosophers, cultural theorists and art critics to enrich our understanding of this genre. Covering the work of well-known artists, including Tracey Emin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whiteread, Cornelia Parker, Vito Acconci, Michael Landy, Richard Wilson, Mike Kelley and Louise Bourgeois, the book also looks at artists who travel across continents, for whom home is a shifting notion, such as Do-Ho Suh and Pascale Marthine Tayou. Discussing a wide range of media, including installation and ?lm, and richly illustrated, Playing at Home is a compelling survey of one of contemporary art’s popular themes.

During the Georgian period there was a remarkable proliferation of seductive visual imagery and written accounts of female performers. Focusing on the close relationship between the dramatic and visual arts at this time, this beautiful and stimulating book explores popular ideas of the actress as coquette, whore, celebrity, muse, and creative agent, charting her important symbolic role in contemporary attempts to professionalize both the theatre and the practice of fine art. Gill Perry shows how artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hoppner or Lawrence produced complex images of female performers as fashion icons, coquettes, dignified queens or creative artists. The result is a rich interdisciplinary study of the Georgian actress.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art