Richard Woods | Holiday Home (Milwaukee) | 2019

British artist Richard Woods has a funny take on the frenetic rise of DIY culture and the English tradition of caravan camping, while pointing to urgent issues like housing insecurity and population displacement.

His cheery houses, built on spec using commercial products and local labor with a paint job that matches a site’s mood, history or light conditions, are everyday homes, scaled small to make them doll-like and intimate. The various positions they assume—floating on a barge in the middle of a lake, perched atop a parking lot battlement, tossed onto a sandy beach close to the high tide line—suggest a family in slight peril, up-ended by the dramatic economic and political forces shifting around them. A home is considered the pinnacle of middle-class success and stability, and was one of the most important markers of arrival in our post-war period. Yet residents of the United Kingdom are facing a dramatic shift in their global leadership with the Brexit vote, which is making residents nervous about their historical standing in the world. 

Woods’ cartoonish sculptures point to the bold Pop aesthetic and visual wit of British painter Patrick Caulfield. However, Woods’ 2018 exhibition at Alan Cristea Gallery, titled The Ideal Home Exhibition, shows him indebted to British artist Richard Hambleton’s famous collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956, that defined Britain’s post-war obsession with consumer culture. The graphic, modular nature of the work also recalls American painter Peter Halley’s paintings of schematized systems, which are both architectural plans and nightmare mazes. Woods creates a range of objects that could fill and cover any home too, including paintings, flooring, and furniture. The artist creates a portrait of contemporary Western society grappling with a new definition of “home”.

In 2019, Sculpture Milwaukee partnered with the Great Lakes Community Conservation Corps [GLCCC] to fabricate Woods’ house. GLCCC, based on the Work Progress Administration’s Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s (which hired unemployed workers across the country during the Great Depression), provides job training skills to a range of students and young adults. This project is unique for the GLCCC team because of the arts focus. Sculpture Milwaukee and the GLCCC leadership will organized a range of learning opportunities for the students so they might see the arts as a possible industry for future employment; from this partnership, the GLCCC launched an arts-focused unit to show their students other industries for future work. For Sculpture Milwaukee 2020, the GLCCC returned to paint new colors onto the work.

In a world that has radically changed since 2019, evoking home is even more radical than before. When our very freedom to move about has been compromised by the deadly novel coronavirus, and the security of home is threatened due to the brittle, intertwined global economy, Woods’ modest home feels like a refuge as never before.