2005
The Harris family’s travel expeditions to exotic locations are evident on the walls and throughout the rooms of Eldon House. The public living spaces of Eldon House — the living rooms, the dining room, the parlour, the office — functioned as the showcase for the Harris family’s privilege of travel. Today however, this living museum highlights the family’s colonial attitude toward the cultures they visited. Like most tourists, the Harris’s removed artefacts from their original cultural and religious contexts and displayed them back in Canada as the rightful spoils of Imperialism. In the same way, Jean Rhys tells the story from the “other’s” perspective in her novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea, recounting the tale of Bertha, the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I have sought to tell the other’s story as well, the one that lurks in Eldon House’s hidden spaces. In contrast to the rest of the house’s ornate décor, the Eldon House attic provides a rich hiding place for all the items deemed unfit for public viewing, such as the packing crates in which the Harris family shipped home artefacts from their voyages. I am interested in the crates themselves, vessels that suggest the potential for travel, and for the hiding place of “stolen” culture in the form of souvenirs. In my installation, I explore the potential of the boxes themselves to disrupt their usual relationship to the artefacts they store and protect. In physically activating the boxes with hidden motors, I hope to evoke a sense that the boxes themselves, like Bertha in Rhys’s attic, will do whatever it takes to get back home, including an old-fashioned haunting of the Eldon house.