We are inundated daily by media stories of extreme poverty and privilege, but we don’t as often hear or see stories about everyone caught in between; those who are less visibly struggling to secure basic necessities tend to get lost amongst more sensationalized stories. There is, in particular, a lack of visibility around artists experiencing varying degrees of housing insecurity. In Itinerant Summer Jordan Holms considers, from an aesthetic vantage, the ongoing housing crisis in London.
In the summer of 2023 Holms was illegally evicted in the middle of the night from her South London home. Due to the highly competitive rental market in London, she spent the next four months couch surfing, house sitting, and living out of her studio while searching for secure housing. As a means of representation for these more nuanced instances of displacement, this series of paintings reference from memory the places Holms called ‘home’ during her search for permanent housing. Embracing a keen sense for architecture and design that ranges across low and highbrow referents, these paintings translate the stylistic and aesthetic idiosyncrasies of the spaces Holms inhabited into abstract paintings. Tethered together by the artist’s fundamental interests in pattern, color, texture, and form, these paintings are all of portable sizes, as if they could easily be picked up and carried onto the next home. That said, this exhibition considers the question: Where are you meant to go when you get priced out of your own home?