Blog: Week 4 | Material Expression

up915094
Mar 4, 2022
2 min read

Updated: Aug 4, 2022

EXPLORE | Writing the Site

Key words: Experience, the body, touch, sound, taste, smell.

"If I could choose anywhere, it would be here. My house. This house. My coffee cup and my pocket-sized copse of birch trees. My kitchen. My terracotta-coloured front door and the ancient doorbell. I love my house." - Christina McLeish, How to Touch Your House

Material and Body

This weeks task was to explore site materiality and its connections to the body. I began by analysing Christina McLeish's "How to Touch Your House", and extracting some of my favourite quotes which describe varying senses in a vivid way. Then, I described the atmosphere within Knight and Lee through subjective material descriptions to capture aspects like temporality, temperature, smell, sound and touch.

How to Touch Your House Analysis

Quote	Sense(s) Described	Reflections
The house announcing the news from outside. There’s a mynah on the skylight. It’s raining. It’s morning.	Sound, sight.	The metaphor used to describe the house as 'announcing' outdoor occurrences creates a sense of personification, bringing the image of McLeish's house to life. The reader can visualise the bird on the skylight, and hear it as its feet patter across the glass. The sound of rain and visualisation of morning within your home is familiar to the reader. These short, snappy sentences are still very powerful in creating an atmosphere in the readers head.
Click, clatter, spit, spat, creak, shhh, knock knock, rrrring.	Sound	Onomatopoeia is a strong literary tool utilised here, in a string of sounds the writer hears around her house. This is successful in describing very literally what McLeish may encounter as she is at home, with each noise likely to resonate with the reader.
I put my temple to the door, threshold between me and the world. My bulwark and my portal.	Touch	This sentence reiterates the general theme throughout this piece of writing. In my opinion, although this was written during the isolating period of lockdown, How to Touch Your House is about noticing the beauty within your current reality. Although many people grew tired of their homes during this time, McLeish highlighted her appreciation for her house and the comfort/protection it provides for her. This attention to detail and vivid description of it via human-non human interactions is what really brings this piece of writing to life.
I was holding my house, my house-person, pressing myself against its slow sorcery, its making of the fantastical, everyday landscape that we call inside. It felt like togetherness, because it was.	Touch	This quote expresses McLeid's comfort within her home, which is tailored to her every need. Although she experiences loneliness, she finds togetherness within this space, describing a close relationship between the human and non-human. This reinforces her rejection of societal views of single women, as she reinstates that she has everything she needs at home and within herself.

This exercise helped me to evaluate literal techniques of describing a space in a way that incorporates many senses. This style of writing allows the reader to develop a deeper understanding of how a space is experienced in reality.

Writing the Existing Site

Writing the Future Site

The existing site had a sense of emptiness and potential that needed to be filled. I expressed this via concrete poetry within the form of the Knight and Lee plan. The concrete poetry for the future site features the continuity of a newspaper background, but it has been transformed into something new. This represents the existing character that was already there, but in a new form, giving the building a new and exciting use.

When comparing my description of the original site with how I visualise the future site, I noted that the future site is full of much more energy and life. I can imagine it being a very social place, where friends can catch up, as well as meet new people to establish a sense of community. I want to create a warm atmosphere, with natural materials that compliment the existing building. This exercise helped me to imagine in greater detail some of the atmospheric aspects that would contribute to that environment.