The Price of Home

Concerned with the cryptic symbology of personally relinquished objects, Michael Andrew Page augments private yearnings into an antiquarian practice of local microhistory. In his work he examines a range of sources spanning centuries drawing on literary accounts, physical remnants and parental mythologies. Deployable tensile architecture has been a dominant recurring theme in Page’s work; in his previous “Bivvy” series, the material and aesthetic characteristics of the form acted as an antithesis of gothic vaulting, mass congregation and gravitational consequences. The Price of Home brings together a group of works that expand to encompass further temporal structures acquitted from the familial landscape. Once the discursive subjects for many a disgruntled East-Anglican, these artefacts, monuments and seemingly sempiternal leisure outlets formerly provided the backdrop for poets, fictional grieving widows and teenage greebos. Functioning as preliminary signals for enquiry, Page expands and equates native utterances as a means of emotional re-occupation and self-assertion. For instance; the chronicled hostile takeover of the Manor by a rogue Countess, recounts compensation paid to the residents in the form of livestock, materials, tools and reliquaries, which act as objective timestamps as descriptors of homely value. Further local legends, narratives and tales place specific objects at critical junctions within the community; bequeathed altar candle holders and towels, a hellmouth adjacent to a roundabout, an ancient island stronghold commandeered by small time dealers, and a roman villa beneath a supermarket. Page re-examines a plethora of material, both found and personal, digitally constructing and collaging architectonic complexes (A-C) and allegorical objects, leaning into perspectival, mathematical abstractions. Here, creative antiquarian conjecture operates as a cornerstone for thinking methodologies applied to the compositions and transcriptions. Images are then processed via cyanotype onto prepared surfaces from which a multitude of delicately applied layers of oil paint meticulously render the picture. There is a fanatical labor underpinning an almost ecclesiastical relationship with the work; a daily devotion to scrutiny and proximity, a brazen act of personal requital. Installed within framing systems matched to the surrounding architecture of the gallery, each fixture responds to the internal structure of each work; collectively reminiscent of contemplative spaces of self-reflection.