Home Brick - Exploring the sensations of home, voice, and brick making
Creators
Overview
The Home Brick explores the sensations of home, voice and brickmaking. The Home Brick is born from the ground, from the earth that somebody lives on, cured in the local atmosphere and imprinted with a tactile sonic description of home. The Home Brick allows the audience to engage with voice and accent, both typically intangible and ephemeral phenomena, in a tangible way that can be held and felt. Through the project we collect ideas about the sensation of home and how it is interwoven with our identity.
Posing questions about how language and voice is represented in archival form, this sculptural archive of bricks challenges the expected form of engagement with an audio archive. Bricks have been in use for over 6,000 years, but the use of bricks crafted from mud and clay reaches back even further. The process of brick making by hand is considered endangered by The Heritage Crafts Association. The Home Brick explores the tactility of the brick making process with the act of making being integral to the ‘finished’ artefact.
##Process
An iterative process has allowed us to reflect on each version giving the artefact a micro heritage of its own. We would encourage others to not see the process and product as separate entities, for us the brick output is as important as the process. Our recollections and memories of the sensations we’ve experienced in making, designing and collaborating have been a key part of this process.
Read more: https://epoiesen.library.carleton.ca/2021/10/09/homebrick/
Paradata
Judges’ Comments
Brick by brick, this project builds an impressive piece of work! Our judges were delighted in this project. “The Home Brick engages with the sensations of touch and sound extremely well. I loved the idea of turning intangible sensations tangible. The decision to focus on the feelings evoked by a concept such as home was also a creative interpretation of the theme.” “I might be in love. Extremely polished paradata, images and content. I think this is a classic Heritage Jam in the sense that it is a beautiful intersection of originality, playfulness and creativity connecting materiality of archaeology and heritage, with technological innovation.” “This project is the epitome of what I love about the Heritage Jam. It is innovative, fiercely creative and very original. I loved the inclusion in the paradata of the design process, showing the thought processes jumping from shoeboxes to bricks and seeing the evolution of the idea. As they say themselves, the process is just as important as the final product – and the physical process of recording the voice, digging the materials for the brick, moulding the brick and then finally literally engraving the brick with the voice that it also contains is just fantastic.”
Concerning the paradata, one commented “: Pheweeee, just when you thought it couldn’t get better – the paradata knocks it out of the park. Clear, well argued, well thought through – incredibly well illustrated. Judging by the quality of the argumentation, presentation and illustration I suspect that this document wasn’t prepared especially for the Heritage Jam and perhaps has also been entered in some other competitions – and if it hasn’t been it absolutely should be!”