The Heidelberg Project - detroit - 2026
HOW IT CAME ABOUT
While researching my own work, I came across Tyree Guyton's Dotty Wotty House and wanted to understand more about it – and paint it. That first painting led me into the wider Heidelberg Project, its houses, community and Detroit history.
Over the following year, through research and ongoing conversations with the Heidelberg Project, one painting gradually became twelve – my own artistic response to Tyree's extraordinary body of work and the stories held within it.
MAKING THE ARTWORK
Working from the UK brought its own challenges. I couldn't simply visit the houses or take the photographs I needed, so each painting involved piecing together visual references, details and research to understand what I was painting.
I often worked on two or three paintings at a time, mixing colour intuitively as I went. Leftover colours from one work found their way into the next, with new mixes building upon old ones. Traces of one painting quite literally exist within another.
MORE THAN THE BUILDINGS
As I learned more about Tyree Guyton's work and the history from which the Heidelberg Project grew, the houses stopped being simply interesting subjects to paint. The people, community, history, resilience and changing neighbourhood became increasingly important to how I understood the work.
Heidelberg also helped me put into words something I'd felt for a long time about my own practice – an interest in home, belonging and the traces people leave behind. It isn't architecture for architecture's sake that keeps me interested; it's the human story held within it.
I particularly value collaborations where artwork can contribute something back to the place, organisation or community that inspired it. The resulting twelve works now form a limited-edition print collaboration with the Heidelberg Project, helping to support its continuing work in Detroit.
