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'I find new things I'd forgotten I needed': Consumption, domesticity and home renovation
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'I find new things I'd forgotten I needed': Consumption, domesticity and home renovation
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Journal Article
'I find new things I'd forgotten I needed': Consumption, domesticity and home renovation
2016
Overview
This paper explores the numerous ways in which domestic space is represented as a site of excess, consumption and desire in texts from different ends of the cultural spectrum: contemporary home improvement culture, in particular renovation programs such as The Block (2004-), as well as in a selection of poems by contemporary Australian female poets. I examine the development of house renovation as a cultural phenomenon in Australia, particularly in Australian reality television, and consider some of the uncanny devices used to construct a fantasy of completion and wholeness that is implicit in most popular home improvement texts. By fixing the house, these programs suggest to viewers, the inhabitant becomes a better person, better parent, better consumer (insofar as their purchases reflect particular middle-class tastes and styles). Whereas there is a great deal of critical and creative work on the overlapping paradigms of architecture and narrative, \"poetry, in contrast, is a space that does not permit ready entry\" (Brewster 143).
Following this, I explore how representations of renovation in contemporary Australian poetry challenge the mythologies of comfort, security, heteronormativity and unity embedded in the aspirational and materialist images constructed by television renovation narratives. Analysis of the poems reveals a more unsettling view of renovation: they present experiences in which houses that were seen as hermetic and protective are made permeable and alienating. Familiar domestic spaces become subtly or overtly unfamiliar. Through this analysis and a brief discussion of my own creative practice, literary representations of acts of renovation are shown to be far-reaching and complex.
