The Blue Rooms, Tracy Staunton

Publication accompanying the exhibition The Blue Rooms at the City Assembly House, September 2023.

The Blue Rooms is a series of projected images in domestic rooms in houses in Dublin City, photographed between 2019 and 2023. The rooms are various, and represent a cross-section of domestic space in the city. They present a poetics of private space, of interiority, intimacy, and ‘home’. The rooms depict domestic space as both singular and universal. In these works ‘home’ is the same, but different, for all. It is the first place, a lifelong companion. Home is a repository and an archive, memories cling to home. At home, time is heavy with their weight, it flows slower than outside. Home-time has a density, like matter. Moments contain moments that belong to other homes and other times. A room contains all rooms. Home time is the time of mind, of the inner world. Familiar objects conjure a multitude of similar objects. This chair recalls ‘her’ chair. That curtain lightly fluttering conjures another evening, another place, and an old friend. The sound of dinner plates carries the intimacy of dishes done, a quiet house, time rolling over. The ‘Blue Rooms’ re-call moments, evenings, cups of tea, leavings, and happy and sad days.

Self Published
Softcover
56 pages
240 x 165 mm
ISBN 9781399948043