From 11th – 18th March, an old house in Leeds will be filled with book works and site-specific performances and sculptures for the exhibition Home from Home. This exhibition is put together by artist Louise Atkinson and features around 80 – 90 artists (she must be crazy).

I have made a doorknob for the show:

Doorknob. A functional object made specifically to indicate an entrance to a space for reading, thinking and plotting.

I find myself veering  towards making more functional objects recently and wanted to make something that could be used and possibly overlooked. Some people used to have doorknobs designed specifically for each room, so it acted as a kind of key to what was behind the door. I wanted to make one that was specifically for a room used for thinking/reading/writing. I like this small space within the doorknob replicating the space it opens on to.

I first made doorknobs at Hospitalfield House in 2004 when I was resident there with the Royal Scottish Academy. It was Willie Payne who told me about the way doorknobs had been used and the house there had different knobs for its main rooms. The attic room at Hospitalfield became my favourite place to work and it was full of old papers and archival stuff. I was thinking about this when I re-made this little piece (see picture above). I’d like to make myself a whole house-worth of doorknobs at some point, with a more contemporary view point…

The exhibtion will run alongside International Contemporary Artists’ Book Fair Leeds

The event on facebook here and a list of participating artists with details of work on the Artists’ Book Collective archive