Domestic Vernacular
Areena Ang, Jessie Evans, Lucia Farrow, Sophie Jung, Giulia Ley and Lulu Syracuse
curated by Lydia Eliza Traill
24 October - 22 November, 2025
The show is called “Domestic Vernacular”. I originally chose the word “vernacular” for its use in describing an architectural style local to a specific geographic region. A type of folk-style building commonly referred too as “English Vernacular”. Architecture acts as a kind of language, a psycho-geographical semiotic code encrypted into landscape, flaneurism and public space.
The vernacular is synonymous to colloquial. Folkloric, or art outside the public authorised realm, is usually restricted to the private home. The domestic is a fitting comparison - the realm of the woman, or child, it also sits outside of the monumental or governing sphere. It is here that we find the purest forms of expression, unbridled by ideology, expressions of “soft-power”.
I began thinking about the domestic as a site of psychic visual expression. I wanted a show that conjured the feelings of both Dorothea Tanning’s Room 101 and Gregor Schneider’s Haus u r.. Both works are large-scale installations that play with the home, or the familiar, as a place (palace) of repression and architectonic fear. Any gendered connotation to “Domestic” is largely coincidental: the domestic space, to me, is where our personal vernacular is most often felt, and while it is traditionally a matriarchal sphere, this is no way prescriptive.
The vernacular is synonymous to colloquial. Folkloric, or art outside the public authorised realm, is usually restricted to the private home. The domestic is a fitting comparison - the realm of the woman, or child, it also sits outside of the monumental or governing sphere. It is here that we find the purest forms of expression, unbridled by ideology, expressions of “soft-power”.
I began thinking about the domestic as a site of psychic visual expression. I wanted a show that conjured the feelings of both Dorothea Tanning’s Room 101 and Gregor Schneider’s Haus u r.. Both works are large-scale installations that play with the home, or the familiar, as a place (palace) of repression and architectonic fear. Any gendered connotation to “Domestic” is largely coincidental: the domestic space, to me, is where our personal vernacular is most often felt, and while it is traditionally a matriarchal sphere, this is no way prescriptive.
Domestic Vernacular is a mixed-media show of painting, sculpture and photography that examines how visual language, both figurative and realistic, becomes a vernacular for artists. How images become common, quaint, and easily communicable but misunderstood or romanticised, from an outsider's perspective. Vernacular has emerged in art styles once again as a form of resistance against homogeny = the incorporation of difference as a method of suppression. This reflects the typological language of art theory as much as it pertains to style, taste and denominators of distaste: kitsch, vulgar, naff.
How do we project our internal selves onto our built surroundings, and how does this distort said structures? One medium is the “retro” or vintage aesthetic, a vernacular that is now dated, which is reclaimed by artists in both figurative painting and installation work. This retroactive vernacular is transformed - it glitches and replicates, imitating the language of technocracy by morphing itself with established codes and structures. A domestic vernacular for the digital age.
Text by Lydia Eliza Traill
How do we project our internal selves onto our built surroundings, and how does this distort said structures? One medium is the “retro” or vintage aesthetic, a vernacular that is now dated, which is reclaimed by artists in both figurative painting and installation work. This retroactive vernacular is transformed - it glitches and replicates, imitating the language of technocracy by morphing itself with established codes and structures. A domestic vernacular for the digital age.
Text by Lydia Eliza Traill
Carpe Diem, 2025
Jessie Evans and Giulia Ley
found objects, vinyls stickers, paint
site specific
Jessie Evans and Giulia Ley
found objects, vinyls stickers, paint
site specific
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Don‘t Ring if you don‘t Swing (don’t waste your concrete on me. Your ash felt soft and warm on my souls, the fire has been out for, what, a minute or two? A month or ten years? It won‘t be long, my life expectancy has just dropped to its knees to thank you for your kindness, sir.),2025
Sophie Jung
Caved lion‘s foot, miniature silver heels, footbridge, marble slate, Gino Colombi for Kartell ashtray, perspex slope, miniature fur coat and hat
290 x 71 x 40 cm
Don‘t Ring if you don‘t Swing (don’t waste your concrete on me. Your ash felt soft and warm on my souls, the fire has been out for, what, a minute or two? A month or ten years? It won‘t be long, my life expectancy has just dropped to its knees to thank you for your kindness, sir.),2025
Sophie Jung
Caved lion‘s foot, miniature silver heels, footbridge, marble slate, Gino Colombi for Kartell ashtray, perspex slope, miniature fur coat and hat
290 x 71 x 40 cm
The Mute Swan of Europe is your Ugly Daddy (Empath or Empire: Open your mouth),2025
Sophie Jung
Peel, contact print negative, rocking swan, signed and framed print of David Prowse as Darth Vadar)
195 x 86 x 45,5 cm, 2025
Animal Exhibit, unexposed, 2025
Sophie Jung
fledermaus stool, Perspex packing box, seal of approval, threatened bear with us, miniature TV, unexposed negative contact print, cat claws, my neighbour‘s used curtains
80,5 x 59 x 38 cm
Studio Disguise, communal space // Studio Disguise, Install // Studio Disguise, floorspace, 2025
Jessie Evans
graphite and inkjet print on coloured paper
28 x 21 cm (each)
Untitled (Eraserhead), 2025
Areena Ang
pencil on card
21 x 29,7 cm
Oklou, 2025
Giulia Ley
oil on canvas
160 x 45 cm
In Absentia, 2025
Areena Ang
oil, acrylic, marker pen, soft pastel and charcoal on canvas
140 x 180 cm
Pink Soundbowl, 2025
Lucia Farrow
acrylic on photograph
23,5 x 28 cm
Bolts, 2025
Lulu Syracuse
photograph
Ed. 2 + 1 AP
15,2 x 20,3 cm
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