The Uneasy Architecture of Home
Tess Powell’s paintings occupy the unstable territory between home as a physical place and home as an emotional condition. Domestic rooms, familiar possessions, beds, tables and houses recur throughout her work, yet they rarely offer the security traditionally associated with such subjects. Instead, Powell presents the domestic interior as something mutable and psychologically charged, a place in which memory, displacement, illness and isolation become embedded in objects and architecture.
This tension is particularly evident in Alone in My Room. A bed fills much of the composition, its expanse of green interrupted by a small, dark red form at its centre. The figure is dramatically diminished in relation to the room around it, almost absorbed into the surface of the bed. Powell avoids detailed narrative, allowing scale, colour and emptiness to communicate the emotional state of the work. The white wall above the bed is almost overwhelmingly vacant, while the radiator, floral pillows and dark wooden bed frame establish just enough domestic familiarity to make the scene recognisable.
Painted following a period of emotional turmoil while Powell was staying near Caernarfon, the work considers what remains unseen when distress is contained within private spaces. There is something particularly effective in the contrast between the ordinariness of the room and the intensity concentrated within its central figure. The bedroom becomes less a refuge than a container for an experience that exists largely outside public view.
A comparable sense of exposure appears in Artist Eating, painted during a prolonged period of illness and isolation. Here the figure is far mokilre visible, seated at a table and caught in the simple act of eating. Yet Powell turns this everyday gesture into something strangely uncomfortable. The artist appears partially undressed, leaning forward with an apple raised to her mouth. Around her are the familiar components of domestic life: books, pictures, a table, ceramics and flowers. Their presence does not soften the scene. Instead, they heighten the sense that we are witnessing an intensely private moment.
Powell’s handling of the figure is deliberately direct rather than idealised. The body belongs to the room rather than being presented for admiration. This refusal to separate psychological experience from bodily existence gives the painting much of its force. A previous review of Powell’s work in Nation.Cymru similarly identified the importance of vulnerability, isolation and domestic unease within these paintings.
Pethau Cartrefol approaches belonging from another direction. The Welsh title translates as ‘Homely Things’, and the painting gathers together a collection of objects from the mantelpiece of Powell’s Swansea home. A fruit bowl, clock, glasses, ceramic vessels, books and decorative objects form an idiosyncratic still life. Individually they are unremarkable. Collectively, however, they become almost portrait-like.
Powell is interested in the way possessions accumulate private meaning. Objects that might appear strange, unattractive or insignificant to somebody else can become powerful markers of familiarity to the person who lives alongside them. Her still life therefore extends beyond observation. It asks where the sensation of home actually resides. It may not be the building itself, but the peculiar arrangement of things gathered within it.
This question becomes explicit in My House. Created from cardboard used during Powell’s move from Swansea to Cardiff, the material carries its own history of relocation before the image has even been considered. The house is opened up like a stage set or doll’s house, revealing rooms stacked one above another. Yet these interiors quickly depart from architectural reality. Creatures occupy one floor, fire consumes another, and magpies stream from the chimney.
There is humour here, but also considerable unease. The building becomes an imaginative portrait of habitation rather than a straightforward representation of a particular property. Its theatrical construction suggests that domestic stability may itself be partly fictional, something assembled from rooms, rituals and expectations. Using moving boxes to construct the work strengthens this idea beautifully. The material associated with leaving one home and entering another becomes the structure through which the very idea of home is questioned.
Powell’s experience of migration provides a wider framework for these concerns. Originally from California and now living and working in Wales, her practice is informed by the disorientating experience of belonging to more than one place while never feeling completely anchored to any of them. Her growing relationship with the Welsh language and culture adds another dimension. Welsh enters the work not simply as a linguistic reference, but as part of an ongoing process of making connections with place, community and identity.
What makes Powell’s work compelling is that these larger questions are approached through modest, everyday subjects. She does not attempt to illustrate migration or alienation literally. Instead, emotional displacement appears through an oversized bed, an awkwardly intimate meal, a collection of treasured objects or a house whose internal logic has become fantastical.
Her palette reinforces this mixture of familiarity and instability. Acid greens, pinks, purples, oranges and softened pastels lend the paintings a playful immediacy, even when their psychological content is considerably darker. Perspective can shift, proportions become strange and objects assume unexpected importance. Rather than correcting these disruptions, Powell uses them to describe how a place feels rather than how it objectively looks.
Across these works, home emerges not as a fixed location but as something continually reconstructed. It can exist within an object, a language, a room, a memory or even the cardboard left behind after a move. Powell’s paintings recognise the comfort of domestic life while refusing to romanticise it. The rooms may shelter us, but they also contain what we conceal. In that tension between belonging and estrangement, her work finds a distinctive and increasingly assured visual language.
