Living rooms: Anne Tallentire’s Material Distance

Cultural geography has a long and fruitful tradition of working at the intersections between geography and performance art: in this piece we build upon this by considering how artistic practice can shed light on the housing crisis via a focus on quotidian practices of housing design. Here, we focus on Anne Tallentire’s exhibition Material Distance, which took place in 2022–23 at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK. A conceptual artist working with moving image, installation, performance and photography, Tallentire’s work has frequently addressed issues of spatial cognition, homemaking and transience. Material Distance extends this interest by foregrounding issues of housing size, adopting the abstract forms of representation – floorplans, measurements, technical drawings – which professionals use for determining the material and physical requirements of domestic inhabitation. Contrasting abstract and lived experiences of home, and comparing housing constructed on post-war council estates with some of the smaller homes recently converted from industrial or retail premises, Tallentire’s work invites us to develop a critical awareness of dimensionality through an embodied encounter with art that is relational, performative and experiential.