Artist Martha Orbach's exhibition - To Build a Home - video Dailymotion

The Scotsman

GLASGOW. Glasgow Women’s Library.  Glasgow-based artist Martha Orbach, at her exhibition, To Build a Home at Glasgow Women’s Library.   To Build a Home by Glasgow-based artist Martha Orbach, opening Thursday 30 October (5-7pm) and running until 17 January 2026.  The exhibition explores the process of homemaking in times of environmental, personal, and societal crisis - asking what it means to create stability and care amid uncertainty. Using domestic debris and biomaterials, Orbach creates fragile, poetic “little attempts at home,” inspired by her Jewish heritage, radical environmentalist upbringing, and experiences of motherhood.  Developed in collaboration with Caroline Dear, Victoria Mitchell,  Lucy Cathcart Fröden and the Joyous Choir at Maryhill Integration Network, the show reflects on repair, waste, and belonging - blending the radical and the domestic in what Orbach describes as “Baba Yaga’s hut in a shade of Farrow & Ball.”

Transcript

00:00I'm Martha Orbach and I'm an artist.

00:03So we're here at the Women's Library.

00:05I'm working on an exhibition that's opening on Thursday called To Build a Home.

00:09It's an exhibition about homemaking amidst these times of crisis

00:13and it draws on my kind of migrant, unusual environmentalist upbringing

00:19and also just my experience of being a fairly domestically incompetent mum

00:24trying to make a home and so it's kind of exploring domesticity like that.

00:29It centres around a series of little attempts at home.

00:32They're these precarious structures that are made out of domestic debris, twigs,

00:37all the sort of bits and pieces that are involved with making a home.

00:40So there's bank statements, there's plasters, there's cotton wool, there's baby wipes,

00:46there's paint, all the bits and pieces are in there.

00:49Yeah, I grew up amidst environmentalists and radicals

00:52and I'm very aware and interested in how humans reintegrate themselves into their environment

00:57and so the kind of link with birds' nests and how we make homes

01:01which also don't impact other species' abilities to make homes

01:04and the connections between us making a home and the other species making a home,

01:09those kind of interspecies connections are all in there.

01:12Part of making them for me was this kind of process of trying to reconcile

01:16this kind of eco-building, radical upbringing with ideal home magazines,

01:24farrow and ball paint colours and like the kind of ideals around domesticities

01:29that we set ourselves so they're kind of a mash-up I guess in that way.

01:33I guess I'm interested in people thinking about homemaking because we all do it.

01:37It's one of these great things that we've got in common

01:40and it's also something we've got in common with every other species on the planet

01:44so it's kind of an interesting way of thinking about climate change,

01:48how we're all in it together.

01:50One of the things that I was thinking about a lot is the way that homes have to keep on getting made.

01:56It's like this kind of idea that you build a home and you see like homes advertised

02:01but that's not a home, that's a house

02:03and it's this kind of thing I guess of like how you have to keep fixing them

02:07and making them, repairing them, tending to them

02:11and that's kind of, yeah, the bulk of the work.

02:13The exhibition is going to run from the 30th of October until the 17th of January.

02:18Okay.

Artist Martha Orbach's exhibition - To Build a Home

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