Haus: Everything is a Short-Lived Experience

Haus: Everything is a Short-Lived Experience, by Emily Gillbanks, emerges as a philosophical meditation on the nature of home, space, and identity, intertwined with the inexorable passage of time. Drawing on the Heideggerian conception of Heimat and the complex intersection of being and dwelling, Emily confronts the seemingly banal yet deeply existential question: what does it mean to “be at home”?

For Emily, "home" is not just a domestic space or static structure; it is a dynamic point of both belonging and evolution. In Haus: Everything is a Short-Lived Experience, the home becomes a metaphor for being itself—Dasein, always in flux, ever-evolving, and in search of finding balance between the inner self and the external world. This tension, the unheimlich—the uncanny nature of not being at home even within one’s own dwelling—is a central theme in Emily's work, especially in the context of the contemporary market/economy and the improbability of ever owning a house.

When describing her practice Emily remarks, "I observe people akin to a data attainment process…I treat my subjects like algebraic notations, full of coded detail to expand and contract". Her technique, one that incorporates technology at most stages, involves working from images or through different interfaces and screens to capture the technologically mediated state through which we experience the world—somewhere on the sliding scale of fantasy and reality. This technique pushes the genre of New Figuration, casting doubt as to whether a physical sitter is still the most eminent mode: "The way I use paint sensitizes and desensitizes economies of detail; asking how we can paint from life today when screens have become representative and vernacular accounts of vision."

A reflection on her childhood plays a central role in this process. The “Wendy house” constructed by her grandfather Peter Gillbanks when she was 6 years old, becomes the site of this early understanding of home—an ontological gesture, or a microcosm within which identity is shaped and reshaped. This gesture echoes Heidegger’s assertion that dwelling is the essence of being: “To dwell means to be at home,” he writes in Building Dwelling Thinking. Yet Emilys’ exploration suggests that to dwell may also mean to grapple with the impossibility of ever truly being at home.

Emily’s Haus, a 3D construct suspended within the gallery (a Puppenhaus), allows viewers to become subjects, or puppets, within her childhood home. Built by her father, Emily offers a momentary glimpse behind the scenes into her working-class family and the space that forged her. By displaying the work in this way, her canvases are transformed from static images into embodied, physical experiences—a constructed theatre, a Bühne, where mundane daily life becomes a performance, played out under the scrutiny of the omnipresent technological gaze we now live within. Using Apple Vision Pro, Emily has similarly captured each room referenced in the paintings through spatial films, allowing the audience to navigate and haptically engage with the spaces, adding an embodied facet to the experience. This speaks to her wider MA investigation into the Gonzaga Family by Andrea Mantegna, Camera degli Sposi, 1474, in Mantua, Italy. Designed with the intention of eroding the borders between the two and three dimensional in architecture, the illusionistic trompe l'oeil is an early example of what Emily is striving for in her Haus, an augmented reality that is both antiquated (as the concept of a house is) and modern in the technologically mediated lived experience of today, whilst considering how spatial computing aspects cast a contemporary light on New Figuration.

The exhibition's thematic focus on the paradoxes of the home evokes the dialectics of private versus public, light versus dark, being versus becoming. These dialectics are perhaps best captured by Heidegger’s notion of the “house of being,” in which the home is both a place of safety and a space of exposure. The experience of being at home is one of continual negotiation between the present moment and the passage of time, between the self and the world. For Gilllbanks, the home is a site of ontological tension—an existential theatre in which the fleeting nature of life and identity is on display.