'Thrown-togetherness' : queering the interior in visual perspectives

In 2015 I undertook 'Thrown-togetherness', a practice-based research project that explored visual and material processes of homemaking. Working simultaneously as a cultural geographer and an artist in this project, I denote it as 'art-geography', located at a junction of the disciplines of art and geography. The subject for the work was my home, 'Nicola Villa', a Victoria terrace located in Enmore in Sydney's inner western suburbs. Nicola Villa was originally built in 1887, but has been transformed continuously in the subsequent near-130 years through an intersection of human and other-than-human activities (Abram 1997; Whatmore 2002). Nicola Villa is a queer home. I do not want to overdetermine what this means, but instead heed the openness and disruptive unfixing of radical queer critique (Sullivan 2003). While 'explanation' is the currency of social sciences like geography, 'speculation' is the currency of visual art. 'Thrown-togetherness' is art-geography, and so in this text accompanying the visual images I lean towards the speculative potential of art practice, keeping the explanation to a 'light touch' and the visual language open to multiple readings.