At The Scale Of Living with Clare Goodwin

The house where Clare Goodwin has installed her latest project, At the Scale of Living, won’t be there much longer. Soon after our visit the bulldozers will roll into this suburban nook of Zurich and begin the process of tearing the 80-year-old property down. At the Scale of Living is its final act before it will be demolished and then rebuilt as a new family home.

Last night Clare had a little party to celebrate the opening. Evidence of it remains around the kitchen when she welcomes us; bowls of fruit and snacks and empty beer bottles. The house is in Meilen on the eastern shore of the lake, an area often referred to as the Gold Coast, a nickname derived from the long sunkissed afternoons, or maybe the wealth of its inhabitants.

The sticks have already gone up, Clare explains: a Swiss planning requirement that means wooden poles have to be erected to mark the footprint of whatever will replace the current construction, giving neighbours time to lodge their complaints. Clare is looking resplendent in her Drake’s MTO suit, and she gives us a tour of the house and the garden and dives right into its history, which rooms used to be used for what, the stories they contain, the outline of the original front door before an extension was built in the early 2000s.

Clare has spent the last few months here, using the house as something between a studio and a laboratory, working away in the domestic spaces of the house, conceptualising, making and installing the sculptures, ceramics and fabric works that constitute the the project. All the original furnishings, all that accumulated evidence of life and history, are gone, and have been replaced with Clare’s artworks.

"With all the work I've done, I've always responded to the scale of living,” Clare explains. “This project has been a kind of experiment, an exercise in making in a one-to-one scale," she says. “To have a studio in a house where I have a bit of freedom, even though I'm still being quite respectful of the interior."

Despite the impending demolition, the house still feels inhabited. Clare has recalibrated the archetypal forms of domesticity — dining tables and sideboards and light fixtures — into the work. Sourcing used furniture, which she has disassembled and then reconstructed into new configurations.

At the Scale of Living is part of Clare’s continued artistic exploration of domesticity, material memory and the social structures of everyday life, and so the salvaged material is not disguised but celebrated. “Nothing's ever cut with the assemblage work, just deconstructed,” Clare says. “All the forms are drawn from a domestic structure. These tables for example, the extendable ones, the ones grandma would have used for special occasions. There’s something very aspirational about them, something very formal.”

The house belongs to a woman named Tina, whose grandmother had it built in 1940. Clare heard about it last November, when Tina and her husband — an old school friend of Clare's own husband — came for dinner. She was retiring and moving back to live here by the lake, and the condition of the old house and the economics and of the Gold Coast had made demolition and rebuilding the rational choice. Land that had been farming plots when the house was new has in the last few decades become some of the most valuable in Switzerland. "She's quite sensitive about the house," Clare says. “She's really sad that she is knocking it down. But the flip side is — she is knocking it down.”

Clare herself moved to Switzerland just over twenty years ago. Born in Birmingham, she studied at the RCA. After graduating she came to Switzerland for a residency supported by the British Council and decided to make Switzerland her home. Despite being British, it might be more correct to refer to her as a Swiss artist, as it’s been here that she’s lived and worked.

"The fact that the house is disappearing gives the project a particular urgency, but I'm more interested in what a house contains while it's lived in,” Clare says. “The routines and objects we surround ourselves with, the marks of use, the small adaptations. Those things aren't specific to Switzerland. They're part of how people make a life anywhere.”

“Yet the circumstances of the house inevitably resonate with broader questions of changing patterns of living,” she continues. “Occupying a building suspended between demolition and renewal, the project exists in a space between past and future, preservation and replacement, memory and projection.”

Clare moved into the house and began working in January. The heating had been turned off and the house sat cold until March, when things began to thaw out. "We had to kind of come and go," she says, "When it was cold, the house had a completely different atmosphere."

The work itself proceeds by a logic of subtraction and reassembly. The raw materials of the assemblage pieces are sourced mainly through Ricardo, a Swiss second-hand platform that requires you to go and collect in person. "In Switzerland, to dump things costs quite a lot of money," she says. "So it's a win-win. I get something for nothing, and they get it taken away." The table in the main room is made from many such finds, their proportions rhyming well enough to read as one, with an added ceramic inlay made by Clare to link them together.

The curtains came from a textile company whose collaborations with artists Clare has been involved with for several years. The print is a blown-up version of one of her canvas works. Some of the wall-based works were made in her own studio and brought here, everything else was made on site. Her ambition, early on, was to lift sections of the parquet floor — original 1940s blocks — and use them to make woodblock prints. But unable to remove them, she instead turned them into mono prints, something of a memento mori, a physical trace of the old house. Equally, the furniture pieces bear traces of use, small scratches, stains and marks, signs of life.

There is something of the gesamtkunstwerk to it all, the sideboards are stages for the ceramic works, a table creates a possibility, a wall is a space for an image, the house is rearranged into a stage. The domestic form and the exhibition context become indivisible from one another.

"I couldn't renovate, and I didn't want to make it just an exhibition," Clare says. "I wanted to make viewpoints." And so the work coexists with the old architecture of the house, among its memories. Where she repainted walls, for example, it was only at the locations where work would hang, to isolate a surface and turn a domestic interior into something more like a site. The effect is that rooms remain legible as rooms, just with new ways of looking at them.

Soon the project will close, and the work will move to an exhibition at the Helvetia Art Foyer in Basel, Clare stresses how important it is that the work made here will become part of new installations in the future. "When people talk about demolition, there's often an emphasis on disappearance. But for me, this project was just as much about continuation. Nothing here has simply been preserved, and nothing has simply been erased. The project isn't really an ending. It's a moment of transition, where one form of living gives way to another."