Former home an inspiration for artist

Driving through the streets of Greerton four decades after "escaping" was a momentous and emotional journey for artist Lauren Lysaght.
In the pursuit of her former family home, Lysaght's trip down memory lane has come at the end of making and installing her exhibition, My Casa is Your Casa, at Tauranga Art Gallery.
Tauranga was home for Lysaght. Having attended Greerton Primary School, Tauranga Intermediate School and Tauranga Girls' College, Lysaght admits she couldn't wait to get out of town aged 15.
Her saviour was art teacher, Claudia Jarman, at Tauranga Girls' College.
Like many of her generation it was suggested, and perhaps assumed, that she'd train to be a nurse or a teacher.
But it was Jarman who was adamant Lysaght should be an artist. And she did just that, not via the normal process, but alternatively one of experience and self-teaching.
Lysaght has not had a formal art school education, rather she has learnt through a process of problem-solving and experimentation with what she describes as low-rent materials.
The central piece of Lysaght's installation is a model of the family home in Greerton. But it wasn't all happy families.
Indeed, the house conjures up bad and sad memories. Aged 11, her parents split. Lysaght was left with her father - the idea being that she could keep house for him - and her brother departed with their mother.
The house represents a feeling of emptiness, those family secrets tucked away for decades.
Making the house in her Helensville studio compounded some of these issues for Lysaght, and brought others to the surface.
For the first time in all those decades, Lysaght and her brother have just recently talked about the time of the family split. This came about through his visit to Lysaght's studio and seeing the house being made.
Lysaght has a fear, or perhaps dislike, of suburbia. All those three bedroomed bungalows on quarter acre sections don't symbolise happiness for her.
To escape this, Lysaght has lived in various non-suburban homes. Her Helensville studio is in a former BNZ bank. It seems ironic that this exhibition was made in such a building and is now being exhibited in a former BNZ building.
Though the house, and her growing up in Greerton, dates to the 1950s, Lysaght has used her artistic license to expand on the notion of suburbia.
On 10 wall shelves sit 10 individual sculptures representing aspects of suburban life. For instance, a wheelie bin, a barbecue, a clothesline, and so on.
Each is there for a reason. The wheelie bin is secretly about a neighbour who doesn't park his bin outside his own house, but the neighbour's, so as not to spoil the look of his own property.
These smaller sculptures are all white, and against the white gallery walls create delightful shadows. They are reminders of all the parts that make up the whole of our neat and tidy suburban homes.
The house is all closed up. Curtains are drawn, venetian blinds closed. The question we ask is, what goes on behind closed doors? In this case we know it was a family break up.
Though Lysaght always enjoys a new challenge, the house did pose problems along the way.
At first she thought it should be architecturally accurate but soon came to the realisation that she wasn't an architect and that's not what the house was about.
But each room is in existence and no detail left out including the unique louvre detail on some windows that her mother had insisted upon when it was built.
Look closely and you will see that this house has no ordinary roof though. Atop the house are a myriad of demons, little gargoyles, which traditionally protect the occupants of a building. But did they? Not so. Lysaght felt bereft and betrayed by what took place in this so-called family home.
And every house of this ilk has a front lawn and garden. Again Lysaght has stretched her imagination to include a lovely set of topiary shrubs - so not the Greerton of the 1950s but an additional imaginative luxury.
Lysaght has worked long and hard to establish her practice. Always one to push the boundaries, Lysaght is forever on the hunt for new materials.
My Casa is Your Casa runs until December 5 at Tauranga Art Gallery.