Reinvention of a Lost Interior World

This visual essay explores interiority through drawing into a grandmother’s world in the 1950s, Taiwan. My grandmother’s house had never been documented prior to its demolition in1980. This paper is intended to re-invent and re-imagine the potentially changeable, layered and multi-functional interior settings of that house through the act of drawing. Drawing was undertaken through collaging the lost domestic world and became an act of complicity with my distant heritage and a sign of recognition of a shared condition. The house was an economic unit; she shared the house with animals, sewing machines and bentos. Bento is the term used for ‘lunchbox’ and usually ‘layered’ in content. Bento became an object and metaphor for this project that formed a link between the object, the house and the drawing process. Plans and sections are constructed to induce analysis and architectural readings between domestic events: farming, sewing, education, dressmaking and accommodation. The interior resisted the stable and singular condition of the domestic setting and challenged the ‘everyday-ness’ of the house to propose a potentially more adaptable and variable living unit. The interiors of the house were negotiated and fluctuated between changing desires of the inhabitants, re-inventing forms and patterns throughout the day. Five drawings were generated for this project representing the interiority of the house. The first collaged interior (Figure.1) initiated a connection to the process of pattern-making and became a drawing that compressed together time and was followed by four watercolour drawings that described the house in its particular moments of time.