ROOMS: An exhibition of paintings by Kate Bergin
Home can mean many things. It can be an emotional place or a physical location. It’s the place of memories both good and bad and also the place we can truly be ourselves. And within these homes we create rooms.
Rooms to rest alone, rooms to gather and play and rooms where we share the most basic of our everyday lives and also the most special & extraordinary occasions.
The Living Room, The Rumpus Room, The Dining Room just to name a few. We sit in these rooms inside these houses and watch T V shows about how other people live in their homes and decorate their rooms.
We watch Escape to the Country and imagine moving to an idyllic property in a beautiful small country town. We watch Grand Designs and imagine creating the perfect home. Perhaps we even watch the Housewives series and voyeuristically look through the peepholes of the rich and dramatic.
Real estate websites allow a vie w into houses for sale where we can pore over floor plans and match them to our perfect lifestyle, designating rooms for all the family and imagining how we will all interact together.
Having just moved from Queensland to Adelaide I can admit to being slightly obsessional about floor plans and dividing the house up into working and living spaces. Bedrooms for everyone and trying to create the perfect balance, at least in an architectural sense. The rest we always hope will follow!
But what I’ve noticed since starting to think about our personal spaces, our domestic jungle, is how the word
“Room” is used for political spaces too, my favourite being “ The Situation Room”. What a brilliant name for the US 24 hour watch and alert centre that provides intelligence to the President. And the West Wing of the White House has the wonderfully named “ The Cabinet Room”.
Perhaps by calling them Rooms underplays their dramatic role and makes them less disconcerting. The simplicity of “ The News Room”, “ The Staff Room”, “ The Bed Room” and the photographer’s “Dark Room” as opposed to the enigmatic “Powder Room” all make me smile.
And then there are rooms that by their very name may create a sense of anxiety…“The Locker Room”, “ The Dressing Room”, “ The Green Room” and “ The Changing Room”. Changing into a sports uniform in the freezing cold of a Mornington Peninsula winter are memories best forgotten.
You might have a favourite room…“The Ballroom”, “ The Breakfast Room” or reading a good book in the “Sun Room”. Whatever the room we can be sure that Virginia Woolf ’s concept of “A Room of One’s Own” still persists today.
Woolf ’s essay related to her dissatisfaction with women’s education and the need for a woman to have a room away from domestic responsibilities. With this last house move I found the perfect room to paint. I’ve never called it My Studio it’s always just been My Room. The only difference these days is that I quite like it being close to all the other rooms and being connected with the comings and goings of the house. It feels less separate and more integrated into the open-planned aspect of our lives these days. Perhaps that the full circle where freedom is the ability to be artist, wife and mother in e very room.
