News from Home is a collaboration between visual artist and sociologist Luke Conroy (Australia) and documentary filmmaker and visual artist Anne Fehres (The Netherlands). The core aim of ‘News From Home’ is to engage with the people, objects and stories which make up a local community and communicate these through visual art pieces.
These art pieces take the form of digital photo montages. Each of these montages contains between 2 and 200 individual ‘layers’ which are sourced from the thousands of photographs captured by the artists, alongside archival images sourced from the community in which the project is undertaken.
The starting point for News From Home is the humble postcard. The artists are interested in how the postcard presents highly constructed and idyllic images of a place, yet at the same time fails to acknowledge the more authentic but messy reality of that place. The constructed images of the postcard promote a particular ‘tourist gaze’ of a location, whereby the those who visit a place only seek out to confirm the stylised images and experiences seen in postcards, rather than question them or consider a place on a deeper level. It is this ‘deeper level’ consideration that lays at the heart of this project.
'News From Home' is an ongoing project that has been selected for undertaking in six locations during 2019. See works from these locations below and follow our project on Instagram: @news_from_home
If you are interested in viewing a summary portfolio of this project, click here
News from Home is a collaboration between visual artist and sociologist Luke Conroy (Australia) and documentary filmmaker and visual artist Anne Fehres (The Netherlands). The core aim of ‘News From Home’ is to engage with the people, objects and stories which make up a local community and communicate these through visual art pieces.
These art pieces take the form of digital photo montages. Each of these montages contains between 2 and 200 individual ‘layers’ which are sourced from the thousands of photographs captured by the artists, alongside archival images sourced from the community in which the project is undertaken.
The starting point for News From Home is the humble postcard. The artists are interested in how the postcard presents highly constructed and idyllic images of a place, yet at the same time fails to acknowledge the more authentic but messy reality of that place. The constructed images of the postcard promote a particular ‘tourist gaze’ of a location, whereby the those who visit a place only seek out to confirm the stylised images and experiences seen in postcards, rather than question them or consider a place on a deeper level. It is this ‘deeper level’ consideration that lays at the heart of this project.
'News From Home' is an ongoing project that has been selected for undertaking in six locations during 2019. See works from these locations below and follow our project on Instagram: @news_from_home
If you are interested in viewing a summary portfolio of this project, click here
News from Home is a collaboration between visual artist and sociologist Luke Conroy (Australia) and documentary filmmaker and visual artist Anne Fehres (The Netherlands). The core aim of ‘News From Home’ is to engage with the people, objects and stories which make up a local community and communicate these through visual art pieces.
These art pieces take the form of digital photo montages. Each of these montages contains between 2 and 200 individual ‘layers’ which are sourced from the thousands of photographs captured by the artists, alongside archival images sourced from the community in which the project is undertaken.
The starting point for News From Home is the humble postcard. The artists are interested in how the postcard presents highly constructed and idyllic images of a place, yet at the same time fails to acknowledge the more authentic but messy reality of that place. The constructed images of the postcard promote a particular ‘tourist gaze’ of a location, whereby the those who visit a place only seek out to confirm the stylised images and experiences seen in postcards, rather than question them or consider a place on a deeper level. It is this ‘deeper level’ consideration that lays at the heart of this project.
'News From Home' is an ongoing project that has been selected for undertaking in six locations during 2019. See works from these locations below and follow our project on Instagram: @news_from_home
If you are interested in viewing a summary portfolio of this project, click here
Textile Installation - Solidarity Sky
The textile installation 'Solidarity Sky' was commissioned for the ‘Open Sites’ outdoor art exhibition in Ypres, Belgium during September and October 2022. The work consists of hundreds of images of the sky, submitted to the project by people in over 80 different countries in the two years prior to the exhibition.
Solidarity Sky initially began in 2020 as a virtual community driven artwork with the aim of bringing people together during the various COVID-19 lockdowns through sharing personal images of the sky. People of all ages were invited to become the artists in this project, contributing their own ‘piece of sky’ that joined a larger ‘virtual sky’ made up of hundreds of photographs from across the world. During the project, over 1200 individual photographs from 80 different countries around the world were submitted. It is these images that formed the basis for the installation in Ypres, Belgium.
In developing Solidarity Sky, the artists were inspired by a quote from Anne Frank's diary in which she describes how she looked at the sky from her attic window and was hopeful about the future despite her circumstances: “I looked out the open window...over all the roofs to the horizon, which was so pale blue that the dividing line was not clearly visible. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may experience it, this sunshine, that sky where there is no cloud, as long as this exists I cannot be sad.”
The context of this work is especially relevant for the city of Ypres, a location with a rich history of textile industries as well as a location containing many cemeteries, memorials and war museums that honor the battles that unfolded in this area during World War I.
With the installation, the public audience is invited to take a seat under the work and look up at the sky. By looking through the different pieces of textile to the actual sky above, the work merges with its surroundings encouraging an ever-changing experience with the work and the environment itself. Ultimately, the aim of the textile installation in this context was to provide a meditative experience, promote solidarity and confidence in the future.
