Shelter in paint:
a portrait of an empty house

By

Lacey Jane Wilburn

BFA, Concordia University, 2016

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF FINE ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN

2022

© Lacey Jane Wilburn, 2022

Abstract

Shelter in Paint: a portrait of an empty house is an investigation into private space and private
thought through the visual language of representational painting. Structured as though moving
through the rooms of the house, this paper discusses different thematics of domestic space in response
to a painting created throughout the course of this degree. It considers the entrance for the concept of
interiority, the foundation as the history of interior art, vacant corners as spaces for daydreaming,
domestic objects as portraits of the inhabitant, the neighbourhood in relation to public space, the
kitchen as the domestic core, the bedroom for intimacy, and the attic for secrets and privacy. These
parallels between psychological space and physical space attempt to answer research questions related to
the emotional power of interior space, the rift between public and private life, and the ability of
interior space to reveal to the inhabitant.

Keywords:
Interiority, homes, domesticity, painting, portraiture, private space, psychological space,
pandemic and daydreaming.

1

Acknowledgements

There are so many factors that I am grateful for in this journey.
To the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh
nations, I am so grateful to live, work, create and express joy in these lands of such wilderness and
beauty. Every moment outside is a wonder.

To my supervisor, Dr. Cameron Cartiere, you have aided me not just as an artist, but as a researcher
and as a teacher throughout this journey. Thank you for your encouragement, your guidance and all of
our amazing conversations. To Ben Reeves for your generosity as my internal reviewer as well as an
artistic mentor, thank you for sharing so much time and painting wisdom. And to Kimberly Phillips,
thank you so much for the incredible conversation and insight as my external reviewer.

Thank you as well to Dr. Alla Gadassik. Whatever they are paying you is not enough. You have gone
above and beyond what I knew a teacher could be. Thank you for all past and future brainstorms.

To Landon Mackenzie as my professional mentor and Mollie Burke as my peer mentor. The joys,
lessons and creations together in Studio 188 have been my delightful school away from school.
Working with you has been a pivotal part of my creative career.

Most especially, I would like to thank my cohort, who have made every step of this journey the most
delightful; sharing joy, laughter, stress and inspiration. I cannot believe how lucky we are to become
this wacky little art family. More than anything, it has been you that have made this degree so special.

Also to Sharon Bayly, for the singing and the sawing.
To my family, for always believing in me.
And to my best friend, my life wife, Layla, for everyting.

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Shelter in Paint:
a portrait of an empty house

Table Settings
The Gallery (illustrations) ...……………….………………………………..04
Blueprints ……………………………………………………………………..…..06
Windows: “Oh Tom, you peeper” .………………………………….…..….07
Entrance: the psychological interior .………………………………….……08
The Foundation: a) a brief history of interior painting.………..…11
b) a woman’s place ….…………………………….…...12
Lightswitch….………………………………………………………………..…….15
Vacancies….……………………………………………………………..…………..21
The time-out corner ……………………………………………………………27
Objects: the siren song of silent things ……………………………….…..…31
The Neighbourhood: voyeur walks ………………………………..……..37
The Bedroom: exposing intimacy ………………………………………..…42
The Kitchen: the soul of the abode…….…………………………………….46
The Attic: hoarding secrets and habits………………………………….…50
Exit through the side door……………………………………………..…...54
Housekeeping (bibliography)..……………………………………………..…56

3

The Gallery (illustrations)
Fig. 1: Lacey Jane Wilburn, A bed with no one in it, 2020. 36 x 30 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane
Wilburn
Fig. 2: Harriet Backer, Kitty Kielland Studio Interior, 1883. 16.73 x 14.57 in. Oil on canvas. Public
domain. Lillehammer Art Museum, Norway.
Fig. 3: Cecilia Beaux, Man with the cat (Henry Sturgis Drinker), 1898. 47.99 in. x 34.57 in. Oil on
canvas. Public domain. Smithsonian American Art Museum, USA.
Fig. 4: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Daylight: Divided, 2021, 30 x 24 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn
Fig. 5: Jennifer Packer, A Lesson in Longing, 2019, 108 1/2 × 137 in. Oil on canvas. © Jennifer Packer.
Photo by Ron Amstutz. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; promised gift of
Dawn and David Lenhardt.
Fig. 6: Adolph Menzel, Eisenwalzwerk (Moderne Cyklopen) /The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes) ,
1872-75, 62.2 x 100 in. Oil on canvas. Public domain. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.
Fig. 7: Adolph Menzel, The Balcony Room, 1845, 23 x 19 in. Oil on board. Public domain.
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.
Fig. 8: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Dinner Party 2020, 2021, 48 x 48 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn
Fig. 9: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne (Dust Motes Dancing in Sunbeams) 1900,
27 3/5 × 23 1/5 in. Oil on canvas. Public domain. Ordrupgaard Museum, Denmark.
Fig. 10: Gwenessa Lam, Entrance Interior, 2010, 18 x 26 in. Oil on canvas. © Gwenessa Lam. Photo by
Bruce Campbell. Private collection.
Fig. 11: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Diet Paintings, 2021, installation view Jake Kerr Graduate Studies
Gallery, Emily Carr University. © Lacey Jane Wilburn
Fig. 12: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Diet Painting #4, 2021, 14 x 11 in. Oil on paper; mounted. © Lacey Jane
Wilburn
Fig. 13: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Diet Painting #6, 2021, 14 x 11 in. Oil on paper; mounted. © Lacey Jane
Wilburn

4

Fig. 14: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Medicine cabinet, 2021, 30 x 24 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn
Fig. 15: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Grief Blossoms and Granola, 2021, 24 x 24 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane
Wilburn
Fig 16: Vija Celmins, Fan, 1964; 47 9/16 × 48 in. Oil on canvas. © Vija Celmins. Collection Oakland
Museum of California, bequest of the Danieli Estate.
Fig 17: Brenda Draney, The Visit, 2021, 60 x 84 in. Oil on canvas. © Brenda Draney. Catriona Jeffries.
Fig 18: Jennifer Packer, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!), 2020. 118 × 172 1/2 in.
Oil on canvas. © Jennifer Packer. Photo by George Darrel. Private collection. Image courtesy Sikkema
Jenkins & Co., New York, and Corvi-Mora, London.
Fig. 19: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Pretending to sleep, 2021, 72 x 66 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn
Fig. 20: Lacey Jane Wilburn, In this town, we pull chipped teeth , 2021, 54 x 42 in. Oil on canvas.
© Lacey Jane Wilburn
Fig. 21: LALA (Lacey Jane Wilburn and Layla Folkmann), A comfortable silence, 2021, 2,700 square
feet, acrylic on brick, Kelowna, BC. © Lacey Jane Wilburn and Layla Folkmann
Fig. 22: LALA (Lacey Jane Wilburn and Layla Folkmann), A comfortable silence, 2021, 2,700 square
feet, acrylic on brick, Kelowna, BC. © Lacey Jane Wilburn and Layla Folkmann
Fig. 23: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Sleepwalking, 2021, 54 x 42 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn
Fig 24: Wayne Thiebaud, Untitled (Cupcake), circa 2001, 6 7/8 x 8 7/8 in. Oil and graphite on paper.
© Wayne Thiebaud. Nevada Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of Christie's auction house.
Fig 25: Antoine Vollon, Motte de Beurre (Mound of Butter), 1875-1885, 24 x 19.7 in. Oil on canvas.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., online collection. Public Domain.
Fig. 26: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Watchdogs, 2022, 48 x 66 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn
Fig 27: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Lukewarm, 2022. 66 x 72 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

5

Blueprints

I remember the specialist my parents took me to, back when they didn’t know what caused my
seizures. He was an old man, very kind. He gave me dinosaur stickers and teased me that I had the same
eyes. I didn’t understand what he meant about the eyes until years later. Until I caught my own
reflection during one of my fits and realised how crazed I looked. Cross-eyed, head and hands jerking
violently, mouth snapping open and closed. A dinosaur is right. Reptilian girl-child with a miswired
brain. I stopped seeing the doctor when I learned to hide it. When I was too embarrassed by every
teacher pulling my parents aside to say there’s something wrong with your daughter. See, I have this
thing. Some sources call it a psychogenic seizure1, other sources call it maladaptive daydreaming2. I’ve
always called it this thing. But I hid my thing away from others so I could feel normal and stop scaring
my parents. Tucked it away in the attic with grandma's musty jackets, tangled christmas lights and that
old rocking chair with a limp. I didn't mean to start here. I guess it always started here, but this part can
wait. We will wipe the dust off it later. We are going to take a walk instead.

1

See The Truth about Psychogenic Nonepiletic Seizures
https://www.epilepsy.com/article/2014/3/truth-about-psychogenic-nonepileptic-seizures
2
See Maladaptive Daydreaming: A Qualitative Inquiry
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1020597026919

6

Windows
“Oh, Tom, you peeper”

There is a lamplight glowing from the porch just ahead of us. A soft breeze tickles with the
scent of pine and promise and curiosity. Laughter soaked in barbeque sauce wafts over from beyond
the hedge. We keep walking. The darkness illuminates a large window, like an orange flame flattened
against a curtain of night. Inside, we see an old man sitting in front of his books, gazing at something
we cannot. In another window, a cat swings her tail with the indifference of a god. Silent images spark
from televisions in another home, the same program playing in different rooms. How distant we are as
creatures. How very much the same. This house is empty, but I bet a witch lives here. Her plants are in
full bloom, and her yard looks like a hurricane in June. Rusty tin pots litter the garden like altars. I bet
she brews tea that tastes like thunder. In another house a telephone hoots its mating call and a woman
races to ensnare that midnight crooning. This house looks like a crow, dark and brooding; it recognizes
faces too easily. This house misses its children. This one is sick of getting punched.

When you look at a painting, you stand where the painter stood. That is what this document
is, a journey in step with me, soft-footed on tiptoes. I made these paintings as a passage. As if each
represents a door that can be opened, but not quite closed again. We will look into these rooms
together. We are on both sides of the wall.

7

Entrance
the psychological interior

For one,
a house is first and foremost
a geometrical object, one which we are tempted
to analyze rationally. Its prime reality is visible and tangible, made of
well hewn solids and well fitted framework. It is dominated by straight lines, the
plumbline having marked it with its discipline and balance. A geometrical object of this
kind ought to resist metaphors that welcome the human body and the human soul. But
transposition to the human plane takes place immediately whenever a house is considered
as a space for cheer and intimacy, space that is supposed to condense and defend intimacy.3
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (68)
The decision to pursue my masters degree was due to the dichotomy of my two art practices. I
have a collaborative practice as an urban muralist, and a painting practice in portraiture that I felt
needed focus. When the COVID-19 pandemic graduated from a mild concern in another continent to
a tangible threat outside the door, I found myself, as many others, completely enfolded in my domestic
world, denied access to other people who I love to paint. Mingled fear and amusement waned as two
weeks became two months, but somehow, I began to settle. Unexpectedly, my home seemed to swell
around me; the inside slowly growing larger than the outside. I watched as the walls stretched, the
objects stirred, and sunlight poured in as if teasing with the gossip of the outside world. The house, it
seemed, woke up, and I began looking to the objects and spaces around me as a stand-in for human
experience. Each misplaced cup signalled a remnant of human activity, an open window a ghost of
actions passed. I started considering the history of the house, where all the beds used to be, what rooms
were sacred or ignored. I wondered if dirty dishes were singing or shameful, worn rugs pleased or
abused. I cannot say that my interest in houses only came about with the pandemic; it was simply
3

Poetic manipulation is my own.

8

reinvigorated. I was reminded of my childhood adventures in the many rooms of my first home, how
the furnace room was always a threat, the storage room a treasure trove of secrets, the living room an
arena and stage. As if all this time, the house was just waiting for the adult me to come play (Narnia
was in a wardrobe after all).

During these two years the wording of the pandemic health order kept surfacing in my mind:
Shelter In Place. I thought so much about that sentence, what does it mean, to shelter in place? What
does that mean to one living in a dangerous home, or for someone without a home? This ambiguous
phrase coupled with exploring the empty rooms in my house unearthed new questions I desired to
answer: Why is it so charged to be within someone's home? Why is the inside so different from the
outside? What do our objects and spaces say about us in our absence? And why is it enticing to be the
voyeur- to hold a one-way window into someone else’s private world? These questions brought me to
the concept of interiority4–what I now think of it as the invisible energy of private space–and also to
the four pillars of my research. The first being The Poetics of Space by renowned French philosopher
Gaston Bachelard; who in 1965 argues, rather beautifully, for the emotional energy that harbours
within the walls of our dwelling places and the psychological connection between different parts of the
house and the human mind. He also illuminates the importance of houses to daydreaming, which we
will visit later. Next is Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977) by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
which interests my dual art practises by distinguishing public space, and how we navigate and
understand our external, civic world, from private space, which represents our interior, personal world.
The third is At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010) by British-American author and
humanities historian Bill Bryson, which chronicles the history of the world through the objects and
areas of domestic life, and fourth is At Home: The Domestic Interior in Art (2006), by British art
historian Frances Borzello, which opened my eyes to the entire framework for the emergence, rejection

4

Interiority: noun: the quality of being interior or inward. Oxford Languages.

9

and gender politics of interior paintings throughout history. With all of these new concepts, my work
began to pivot. I began painting a new kind of portrait.

Fig. 1: Lacey Jane Wilburn, A bed with no one in it, 2020. 36 x 30 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

10

The Foundation
a) a brief history of interior painting

It came as a surprise to me to learn that the art of the interior was not a subject in art at all until
the 19th century. For most of art history, it remained in the background, even long after landscape and
still life painting became subjects in their own right. Interior paintings only emerged, somewhat
meagerly, along the tails of genre painting5. In At Home: The Domestic Interior in Art, Borzello states
that at the end of the 18th century, three main factors culminated in art coming down “from the high
perch of history:” the rise of the middle class, possession of visual art signifying cultural literacy, and
the “new sanctity of the private sphere” (35). Paintings became more relatable to working and lower
class citizens as chroniclers of everyday life, and with this shift, paintings of rooms appeared. Not just
as background or markers of class, but the room as a subject in its own right (Borzello 6). This is, in
part, due to the social and cultural renovation of domestic architecture in Europe. Historically, poorer
families lived in a single room, whereas the nobility and wealthy resided in vast open halls where the
entire household congregated, but according to Borzello, by the 18th century homes began to give way
to boundaries, with separate rooms for eating, cooking, sleeping, entertaining etc., thus developing
divisions between household activities, parents and children, and servant and employer (41). French
historian Philippe Aries adds:
The family began to hold society at a distance, to push it back beyond a steadily extending zone
of private life. The organisation of the house altered in conformity with this new desire to keep
the world at bay. It became the modern type of house, with rooms which were independent
because they opened on to a corridor…..It has been said that comfort dates from this period; it
was born at the same time as domesticity, privacy and isolation” (Aries in Borzello 41).
This “extending zone of private life” is how I have felt regarding my home during the
pandemic, and without initially realising it, my paintings began reflecting those same three themes:
domesticity, privacy and isolation.
Genre painting: a style of painting depicting scenes from ordinary life, especially domestic situations. Oxford
languages.
5

11

The Foundation
b) a woman’s place

It is also very important to note the work of female artists during this time in Western history.
Women in Europe were forbidden to attend art academies, even in Paris which was the flourishing
centre where many artists flocked (Borzello 39). These women were denied access to nude models, they
could not join male artists even when landscape painting outside, and most significantly, they could
not leave their homes unchaperoned (Borzello 39). Unwilling to deter their artistic ambitions, women
began to teach themselves and each other by painting their domestic world. It is because of tenacious,
determined and motivated women that the domestic interior became a subject of art.

Fig. 2: Harriet Backer, Kitty Kielland Studio
Interior, 1883. 16.73 x 14.57 in. Oil on canvas.
Public domain. Lillehammer Art Museum,
Norway.

Here, Harriet Backer, who became
known for her compelling interiors,
portrays her friend and fellow artist Kitty
Keiland. The two Norwegian artists
moved to Paris in 1880 to pursue their
artistic passion, and are two of many
female artists who would live and work
together in Paris to form their own
female artistic communities.

12

This growing interest in a comfortable home environment developed a new domain ruled by
centres of emotion that did not remain limited by socio-sexual status. In Space and Place: The
Perspective of Experience, Tuan explains, “inside the enclosure, undisturbed by distractions from the
outside, human relations and feelings can rise to a high and even uncomfortable level of warmth”
(107). This uncomfortable level, I believe, refers to the vulnerability that exists within a home. One
painting from this time that articulates this is Man with the cat (Henry Sturgis Drinker) by Cecilia
Beaux (1898).

Fig. 3: Cecilia Beaux, Man with the cat (Henry Sturgis Drinker), 1898. 47.99 in. x 34.57 in. Oil on canvas. Public
domain. Smithsonian American Art Museum, USA.

13

Beaux was born in 1855 in Philadelphia, and was tutored in painting at age 16 by Catherine
Drinker, the older sister of Cecilia’s brother-in-law Henry Drinker. Beaux became an accomplished
society portrait artist; a woman with an iron will who used her prowess on the canvas to establish her
feminist pride as a “new women,” a term in the 19th century to describe women who explored
educational and career opportunities traditionally denied to them (Buzwell 1). What compels me so
much about this painting of her brother-in-law is that it presents a rather gentle, and perhaps more
truthful perspective of male domesticity, which was highly uncommon in work from this era. Henry
Drinker was a prominent American engineer, lawyer and university president, but here, with his
comfortable pose and stroking his drowsy cat suggests not a man of the house, but rather just a man in
the house. Even his eyes have a subtle weariness that I associate with coming home after a long day
(which also speaks to his class and status, the privilege to rest once at home). His direct gaze has an
exasperated and somewhat vulnerable state that puts the viewer in the room with him. He is painted
not as an authority, but as an equal. There is a power dynamic that dissolves in the wake of this casual
domestic setting. This brings me back to the concept of interiority. Though interior art was not
credited as an official subject in the 1892 Dictionary of Art, the French term Intimisme was recognized,
which I believe reflects the concept of Interiority. Intimisme is described as a “term applied to paintings
depicting everyday life in domestic interiors, usually referring to the work of Pierre Bonnard and
Edouard Vuillard6 ”(Borzello 167).

The real magic in this work for me is made with the brush, the masterful way in which Beaux
depicts atmosphere and light. How the late afternoon sunlight ripples off his linen suit, and how the
cat just melts into his lap. Beaux knew exactly with what deftness and purpose she needed to apply her
paint and where to withhold. Such as the chair legs: barely rendered, yet perfectly suggestive. Her
background dissolves into an almost abstract, grid-like rendering of chroma and hue, yet her gradient
values allude to the depth of the room. With economic strokes of colour, she has brought me inside the
home of her family. She has painted interiority.
6

Notice they credit only male artists.

14

Lightswitch

Fig. 4: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Daylight: Divided, 2021, 30 x 24 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

Formally, it has been the presence of light that has captured my gaze the most indoors, almost
dictating a type of figuration (made extra special through Vancouver's grey blanket). In a portrait, it is
the subject who commands the attention while the scenery melts away. In an unpeopled room, it is
light who commands the eye. I have been regarding certain areas in my home as being in my favourite

15

time of light. Blue dawn is my favourite time of light on my plant table in my bedroom. Pure darkness is
my favourite time of light for the refrigerator’s artificial glow. The repetitive quotidian experiences of
each day magnify in intrigue with the touch (or absence) of light. With the work Daylight: Divided, I
was drawn to how the light slashed across the room, both illuminating the plant and rendering parts
invisible. It held power over the only living thing in that empty space. In painting it, I wanted to dictate
that commanding energy with a sculptural feel. I began by drawing loosely on the canvas with thinned
purple oil paint. Working freehand from observation does not result in perfect replicas, but it does give
a life to the space; a movement that suggests the atmosphere which is what I am really interested in. I
leave parts of this purple underpainting visible, as I like to build paintings outwards to keep evidence of
both my process and the materials. It's a mark of the artist's hand, and I love finding these treats in
other paintings, as if even across centuries painters are saying look how I moved through these problems.
Working alla-prima with thick oil paint, I move between brushes, palette knife, gloved fingers and
sometimes the back end of my brush as I start to move paint and build outwards. This is my favourite
part of the process, where the materiality of the paint overtakes the subject matter. This is my departure
from the photo references I take (for light, unfortunately, is not a model I can ask to sit still or come
back). I let colour, viscosity, and melting paint dictate the atmosphere instead of detail. I could paint
every leaf on that plant, but then it would be about the plant and not the paint. I like telling both
stories. And now the light, made liquid, can crawl upon the wall.

This painterly dance on the precipice between formal representation and dissolution pulls me
into the stunning works of African-American painter Jennifer Packer, whose canvases seem to both
soak in colour and radiate it back outwards. Though highly figurative, her works abandon a need for
hierarchy, instead constructing rich worlds that transition between domestic objects of familiarity,
figures and the materiality of her paint. In the vibrant work A Lesson in Longing, a domestic interior is
vaguely suggested in some areas and plainly articulated in others. A male reclines in comfort, while a
female character, mostly obscured, remains standing, alert, referencing to me how a home world can be
simultaneously a space for comfort and a site of contention, or unease. Plants, television, photographs,

16

markers of domestic identity all suspend in this unearthly picture plane, which Packer claims responds
to the “messiness of human life,”7 which is evident through her colour stains, each moment bleeding
into the next. She states, “I’m interested in the co-dependency of humans existing in spaces. I’m
interested in the environment as much as the figures that sit within it.”8

Figure removed due to copyright restrictions. Image can be accessed at:
https://whitney.org/collection/works/61697

Fig. 5: Jennifer Packer, A Lesson in Longing, 2019, 108 1/2 × 137 in. Oil on canvas. © Jennifer Packer. Photo by Ron
Amstutz. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; promised gift of Dawn and David Lenhardt.

7
8

Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing. Serpentine Galleries. Video.
See above

17

It is very clear to me that Packer is interested in generating the space as a whole, for the figures
abstract as much as the objects they coexist with, in certain areas even more so. I consider this as a
removal of artistic hierarchy, allowing the figures that so traditionally command the painting plane to
melt away; mere lines given to suggest form and anatomy while the greatest attention to colour resides
in the plants. These moments intrigue me as my work used to rely so heavily on the presence of figures.
Which brings me to a different work by German painter Adolph Menzel, born in 1815 in Breslau,
Prussian Silesia (now Poland). Considered one of the greatest German painters of the 19th century, I
was previously more familiar with his monumental works of Berlin life, particularly Eisenwalzwerk
(Moderne Cyklopen) /The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes), which is a magnum opus of social
realism, depicting the blood, sweat, tears and gloom of industrial labour for the German working class.

Fig. 6: Adolph Menzel, Eisenwalzwerk (Moderne Cyklopen) /The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes) ,
1872-75, 62.2 x 100 in. Oil on canvas. Public domain. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.

18

Though hailed as an “unparalleled chronicler of life in Berlin,”9 I still find myself drawn to a
small series of works Menzel likely never intended to exhibit. In particular, his oil sketch The Balcony
Room from 1845.

Fig. 7: Adolph Menzel, The Balcony Room, 1845, 23 x 19 in. Oil on board. Public domain.
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.

9

Adolph Menzel https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/adolph-menzel

19

This small painting on board compels me for the softness and quietness of this domestic space.
The gentle rippling of the curtain against sunlight suggests a fine day outdoors. The presence of a
figure is suggested with the angled chair. What draws my painter's eye is how the wall is treated with the
same importance as the fine mirror, the texture of the floor as important as the chair. There is no
hierarchy of subject here, the painting is of the mood. Simple sincerity of a beautiful moment in
silence, and solitude. To me, this work represents a social reality just as strong as The Iron Rolling Mill
(Modern Cyclopes), though as Borzello claims, these studies “would never have been accepted as
completed works of art: their subject matter is too indefinite and slight and their technique, though
stunning, far too sketchy for the taste of the time,” (44) (not to mention a “soft” subject left for female
artists).

In fact, this is also how I first felt painting the empty spaces in my house. A subtle surge of
guilt, or self indulgence for creating works with a more gentle interest as opposed to my social impact
portraits. The deeper indoors this pandemic drove me, however, the richer I found the content. There
is a social statement within the walls of our domestic spaces. A more human and less political one.
Borzello states, “these rooms matter. When they contain people, they are about the experience of being
indoors, not just a description but a feeling. When they are empty, they are about the special qualities
of a room, not architectural or decorative qualities as in earlier centuries, but its pleasures, moods and
occasionally its strangeness” (Borzello 6). Though the art of the domestic is considered “lightweight”
when drawn against history painting (Borzello 21), I would argue that these paintings also represent
history. Perhaps even a more universal and relatable one than grand battles or dead leaders. With
interior art, “we search these paintings to find out about ourselves. Not oneself in the singular, but
ourselves in the plural” (Borzello 10). These familiar objects and moods can stretch across history,
bringing me into Menzel’s space in 1845 as much as Packer’s from 2019.

20

Vacancies

“There is nothing like s i l e n c e to suggest a sense of unlimited s p a c e .

Sounds lend color to space, and confer a sort of sound body upon it. But absence of sound leaves it
quite pure and, in the silence, we are seized with the sensation of something vast
and deep
and boundless.
It took complete hold of me and, for several moments, I was overwhelmed by the grandeur of this
shadowy peace.

It asserted itself like a person.”10

-Henri Bosco, Malicroix (in Bachelard 64)

There is a particular tension in absence. I discovered this as my subjects changed from people to
empty spaces. I still think of them as portraiture, but portraits of the inhabitant when the inhabitant is
not there. I feel I understand what Bosco means when he says the silence asserted itself like a person. My
next work Dinner Party 2020 suggests a group portrait, the chairs attentive as if occupants, slightly out
of line, possibly recently vacated. The subject in this painting, however, is the presence of Covid, which
means the absence of guests.

10

Henri Bosco “Malicroix,” in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space page 64. Poetic Manipulation is my own.

21

Fig. 8: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Dinner Party 2020, 2021, 48 x 48 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

“Because of our personal link with rooms, the unpeopled interior can carry an extraordinary
charge of humanity…..We are aware of an absence. Or we sense a presence. Open windows, cushions,
doors left ajar refer to the person who has just left or is about to enter. It seems to be encoded in the
nature of rooms to speak about the human presence” (Borzello 44). I love this sentiment by Borzello
because it suggests that an empty room is staged for the next person to enter (and what happens to
rooms that are never entered again?). This is why these paintings still seem figurative; domestic spaces
without people are haunted by their memory. A ghostly silence embedded in the vacant space.

22

Fig. 9: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne (Dust Motes Dancing in Sunbeams) 1900, 27 3/5 × 23
1/5 in. Oil on canvas. Public domain. Ordrupgaard Museum, Denmark.

One painting that perfectly articulates silence and emptiness is Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne
(Dust Motes Dancing in Sunbeams) by Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916). Borzello
articulates;

[Dust Motes Dancing in Sunbeams] is an image of a powerful stillness that conjures thoughts
of what happens when rooms are left to themselves. It is one of those rare interiors that trap

23

the spirit of the empty rooms, rather than the spirit of those who normally inhabit it. The dust
motes and the pattern of the panes inhabit this space, and their magic dance can be interrupted
only if the door is opened. It is a painting akin to poetry (51).

This sentiment is compelling because it explains how the presence of a human would ruin this
moment, the room holds more power alone. I find a similar evocative poetry in the interior works of
Gwenessa Lam, a silence and stillness that hinges on anticipation, vibrating within the unexplained
emptiness. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard argues for empty space as “a symbol of solitude for
the imagination” (155) as if every corner in which we can hide or can withdraw harbours an
opportunity for the imagination to soar, untethered from visual influence. In the blankness, we are
permitted space.

Fig. 10: Gwenessa Lam, Entrance Interior, 2010, 18 x 26 in. Oil on canvas. © Gwenessa Lam. Photo by Bruce
Campbell. Private collection.

24

There is another aspect to vacancies that I am engaged with, the part I box away. I’m going to
provide a more personal and experiential framework for my condition than a neurological one.11
Maladaptive daydreaming is a form of seizure, though not as scary or dangerous as grand mal12
seizures. It happens every time I daydream, whenever I visualise something, or imagine something.
Which is frankly, all the time. That is what it is, daydreaming. Daydreaming that causes a seizure. Some
days I have 10 episodes, some days I have 100. I can have fits that last hours, or I can have one in the
blink of an eye, while you turn your head, or are focussing on the road. When you describe something
to me, I have to struggle to keep my face calm. Because I am seeing it. During an episode I lose control of
my motor functions, particularly my fingers, hands, face and toes, which can be an alarming sight. So I
learned to sneak them, my fits, like a guilty cigarette. But at home, oh at home! In my familiar spaces,
comfortable, alone, and unwatched, my fits can last hours. In an episode I do not lose peripheral vision,
so movement, someone approaching, or noises will “wake” me. I think this is why I do not have fits
outside. The exterior world is too experiential. Bachelard, who was also very interested in daydreams,
claims that “daydreaming, from the very first second, is an entirely constituted state. We do not see it
start, and yet it always starts the same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and right away is far off,
elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere” (201-202). I cannot flee into the elsewhere if I am stimulated,
which is why it became easy to hide my condition. But alone, in blank and vacant spaces, that is where I
can dream, free to contort, jerk and spasm my way into a new art idea, or read a book fully immersed,
seizuring my way into the most vivid Wonderland or Oz imaginable.

Now for the tricky part……

On omitting the neurological science behind maladaptive daydreaming I have two reasons: one, it is severely
under-researched and the minimal findings have decided it is a coping method for trauma, and two: I am more
interested in the emotional psychology of the home. The correlation between artistic creativity and maladaptive
daydreaming is something I would consider if I choose to pursue a doctorate.
12
See Grand Mal Seizures: https://www.healthgrades.com/right-care/brain-and-nerves/grand-mal-seizures.
11

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Imagine this whole page is your field of vision. Floating in front of your face over your right eye, a
translucent television screen drops down, obscuring about 70 percent of your field of view. You can see
through it and past it, but inside this rectangle you control every image you see. The more you focus on
it, the more opaque the vision becomes, the less, the more your peripheral vision around the left eye
will pull you out of it. Whatever you are thinking about takes shape, if you are thinking about going
for a run, you watch yourself lace shoelaces, brush your hair back, panting to the rhythm of the
pavement. If you are thinking about your next painting, you think of the idea, imagine the surface, the
colours, that mood you want to emulate, or this new technique you are eager to try, you are painting it
in your mind. Your hand is moving. As you move paint the vision becomes more intense, you dive
deeper into the fantasy, you rewind, move things backwards, revision scenarios, no, let's remake it. Your
painting the picture the pieces are falling into place that new form so tangible your colours so vivid
your colleagues are impressed it is on the wall you are exhibiting its the best thing you have made you
love it your friends are talking about it and you don’t know but your hands are clawed into tight fists
your feet are jerking around your face is scrunched up making little squawking sounds your claw hands
punch the table and you snapped your mouth so fiercely that you chipped another fucking tooth
which pulls you back out.
There’s something wrong with your daughter

With a pounding heart, your television fades away.
You unclench your fists.
You notice your left eye again. Your right one feels foggy, disconnected.
But wait. I’m not done. I was enjoying that. Turn that TV back on.

They 13say the maladaptive daydreamer loses four hours a day.
I wouldn’t say loses, we are just spending it elsewhere.
13

The British Psychology Society Research Digest

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The time-out corner

There is another blank corner worth mentioning in my artistic practice, the time-out corner.
Rather un-uniquely as a painter, I often despise work I made, or struggle away in the studio. I think
this actually may be an essential part of the practice of painting (perhaps why it is called a practice).
American virtuoso John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was reported by sitters often muttering to himself,
becoming dejected and miserable throughout painting sessions and scraping off everything he did at
the end of the day (Kits 27). In Cezanne’s Doubt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes how in a constant
state of agitation, rage and depression, French post-impressionist Paul Cézanne would spend 100-150
sessions on a painting and still only refer to it as a study, or an attempt (59). In a recent CBC interview,
Canadian painter Peter Doig discussed how he would often get frustrated with paintings and have to
turn them to face the wall, and at his latest exhibition at Equinox Gallery, Canadian painter Ben Reeves
stated how sometimes paintings need to be ignored for a while to be finished. This should not be so
consolary, but it is. As a community I do not believe artists are necessarily tortured souls or lovers of
sadomasichism, there is quite clearly a deep love and pleasure for the joy of painting that brings us back
to the easel everyday. But every once in a while, some painting just needs to face the corner in shame.

In pivoting my subject matter to architecture and objects, I struggled a lot. I still am. I am
familiar with portraits, I spend so much time studying people, being with people, sometimes forgetting
to listen because I am envisioning how I would describe them with paint. In challenging myself
artistically to create spaces absent of humans, I sometimes just needed a “win.” During the pandemic I
found my way to an online community of portrait artists that started using the app Telegram to share
selfies with each other; providing a ceaseless supply of reference material while the world remained
stagnant. Now at over 2,000 members, the Cane Yo community boasts artists from every corner of the
world, amateurs and esteemed exhibitors together sharing our interpretations of each other through
Instagram. When my new interiors began posing relentless challenges, I would salve my wounded pride
with a quick, no consequences painted oil sketch of one of my portrait compadres. These were both

27

reaffirming in my vocational abilities and functioned as lively experimentations with paint by working
on a smooth, and unpredictable plastic-based watercolour paper called Yupo that I taped to the wall. I
call these sketches diet paintings as they carry less emotional weight. When I realised the success of
some of these diet paintings, I mounted them with their tape onto wood panels painted white,
elevating them to a more gallery presentation, but also leaving evidence of their loose and sketchy
gestation.

Fig. 11: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Diet Paintings, 2021, installation view Jake Kerr Graduate Studies Gallery, Emily Carr
University. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

These works, more directly than the interior paintings, also respond to the intersectionality
between the painter, the sitter, and the viewer. Ben Reeves stated how the indexicality of my marks and
process become heightened by the rough edges, which allows my presence and subjectivity to be felt. It
brings me back to the idea of the entrance, that in these conversations between sitter and viewer, I am
still there. I am still walking the viewer through my paintings.

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Fig. 12 & 13: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Diet Paintings, 2021, 14 x 11 in. Oil on paper; mounted. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

The still life Medicine cabinet has a similar origin story. Drawing from my love of European art
history, I desired to make a simple homage to realism with a classic still life after a different painting had
gone disastrously wrong and left me wounded. I needed a breath, and a pause. I put the offending
painting in time-out and reduced my challenge to a simple study of objects. I read this incredible
booklet by Thomas Jefferson Kits about the painting habits of John Singer Sargent–whom I admire
greatly–and was surprised to learn that he painted with massive piles of paint and virtually no medium
or solvent. His rich canvases, even when depicting translucent fabric or flowing creek beds were all
made with generous amounts of heavy paint, rendering the clarity of water simply by observing colour
and tone with great accuracy (and a great deal of virtuosity). He said not to starve your palette, so I fed
it.

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Fig. 14: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Medicine cabinet, 2021, 30 x 24 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

Sargent, indeed, knew his business. Despite the heavy paint application and inability to glide
around the canvas, this painting felt somehow “fresher;” the colours crisper. I can not actually give
Sargent all of the credit, Canadian painter and instructor Damian Moppett also suggested trying to
paint without medium, but at the time it seemed ludicrous and expensive. It took failure to try
something new. Painting is a practice and I am excited that I will never be done learning how to paint.
There is always a new problem to solve, another reason to turn paintings around and try them again.

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Objects
the siren song of silent things

“Home is an intimate place. We think of the house as home and place, but enchanted images of
the past are evoked not so much by the entire building, which can only be seen, as by its components
and furnishings, which can be touched and smelled as well: the attic and the cellar, the fireplace and the
bay window, the hidden corners, a stool, a gilded mirror, a chipped shell” (Tuan 144).

Objects can compose an unconscious portrait. They can be clues to who we are as people. Of
course, there are artefacts in my home that I hope to be associated with if you were to archive my
existence: precious travel journals, my impressive collection of books, my art, or perhaps most
autobiographical, heaps of rocks I collect in piles all over my room. But if I were to ask those that know
me best, I might be associated with other, less seen things: like the hair brush I am always looking for,
or my muddy boots. We want our objects to support our sense of self, (Tuan 196) but we do not often
see ourselves and our lives objectively.

Grief Blossoms and Granola is a painting of a mundane moment that just said so much about
where I was. An accidental still life in a routine pandemic morning. Another cold breakfast, because I
was getting tired of cooking every meal, a tiny box of milk, because in shopping for one a large carton
seemed excessive. And another bouquet of flowers, in condolences, for my housemate's recently
deceased mother. This incidental still life said so little, and it said so much. My decision to enlarge the
bowl was to place the viewer directly at this table, a sense of sitting down, as opposed to walking by.
The green underpainting left visible gives an energy to this piece, and I painted it with exaggerated
movement to suggest the tension in the themes of this work; domesticity, mundanity, isolation, and a
deadly pandemic. This is a new area for me, to bridge the way I create the works with the content of
the painting. It is another way in which I depart from the photographic reference, using colour and

31

painterly dance to give a visual energy to a sensation that I can feel, but not quite see. A parallel
between the physical space, and the psychological space.

Fig. 15: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Grief Blossoms and Granola, 2021, 24 x 24 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

Another aspect to my interest in objects is that they can anchor us; a familiarity born out of use
and habit. As Tuan states, “the home place is full of ordinary objects. We know them through use; we
do not attend to them as we do to works of art. They are almost a part of ourselves, too close to be
seen” (144). These “unattended” objects, I think, make such compelling subjects for art because, for all
their ordinariness, they are loaded when presented through the labour of paint (a prime example is the
object paintings by Vija Celmins in the 1960’s).

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Figure removed due to copyright restrictions. Image can be accessed at:
https://www.sfmoma.org/read/artifacts-of-presence-a-common-ungrounding/

Fig 16: Vija Celmins, Fan, 1964; 47 9/16 × 48 in. Oil on canvas. © Vija Celmins. Collection Oakland Museum of
California, bequest of the Danieli Estate.

I had a brilliant moment at the recent exhibition of Brenda Draney’s paintings at Catriona
Jeffries when I saw a painting of my grandparents’ couch. Considering Brenda Draney is only 12 years
older than myself and we are both from Alberta, it is probably not shocking to consider that lower
income families from the Canadian prairies would have the same lurid furniture from the seventies.
Though the potency of this work is in the blatant and horrifying systematic racism toward Indigenous
families and persons in this country--throughout every decade since colonisation–I still could not help
finding a personal flicker of attachment, even joy, with that couch. Paintings have a way of connecting
us, and I think this may be more possible the less realistically they are painted. A looseness of rendering
and suggestion of form can provide more space for the viewer’s interpretation. This is a challenge I am
now posing to myself as a painter. Though this work is highly political, Brenda Draney knows how to
leave space: conceptual, and literal.

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Fig 17: Brenda Draney, The Visit, 2021, 60 x 84 in. Oil on canvas. © Brenda Draney. Catriona Jeffries.

A similar connective thread of objects to traumatic racial injustice is in the gripping and
monumental painting by Jennifer Packer Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!) from
2020. Based on the horrific murder of Breonna Taylor in her own home in Louisville, Kentucky by
American police officers, Packer’s painting was a reaction after seeing the crime scene photos. “I saw
things that I recognised, things that I would have seen in my own apartment. I could almost conflate a
time in my life materially to what I was seeing in hers. I felt this sense of connection14”.
Her comment suggests a different kind of anchoring, one of pain and vulnerability. How these
objects expressed a reality that any black person in America could have been Breonna, that safety in
one’s home can be shattered by racial injustice or police brutality. There are also really potent formal

14

Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing. Serpentine Gallery video

34

similarities between Draney and Packer’s paintings. The composition is strikingly familiar with the
dominance of a figure on a couch in the bottom right corner, the domestic settings are rendered
through simple markers of familiarity, and much of the atmosphere is generated within the vast
negative space. Draney’s work is more taut with the obvious police presence, but Packer’s, though
appearing serene, is more horrific by the knowledge of these events, even with police absent from the
painting.

Figure removed due to copyright restrictions. Image can be accessed at:
https://whitney.org/exhibitions/jennifer-packer?section=5#exhibition-artworks

Fig 18: Jennifer Packer, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!), 2020. 118 × 172 1/2 in. Oil on canvas. ©
Jennifer Packer. Photo by George Darrel. Private collection. Image courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and
Corvi-Mora, London.

35

Domestic spaces are not always safe. They are not always private, and they most certainly can
be political. Which is a much bigger conversation than this paper has room for. Though of mixed
settler and Indigenous ancestry, in discussing the emotional and psychological spaces within my home I
am speaking from my white privilege living in a safe neighbourhood in an expensive city in Canada.
Human spaces will always be charged with emotion, troubles, and trauma, but these experiences are
not universal, and they definitely are not equal. This, I believe, shares more of the autobiographical
nature of interior paintings. Though composed of vacant spaces, my privilege, my class, and even my
interests can be made visible through the areas and objects I paint. Our interior worlds can share truths,
even when the focus is a couch, a blossom, or a bowl of cereal.

36

The Neighbourhood:
Voyeur walks

As the pandemic continued to assert that the safest place was in isolation, I spent more time
walking and bicycling around outside, particularly on less busy and more residential streets. With the
thrill of exploring a new city, I would meander aimlessly, try alternate routes, simply observing,
exploring and mentally mapping. What came next began as a casual observation of beautiful houses, as
coming from Montreal, large character homes with yards are a rarity. Vancouver, with its big
freestanding homes, full of hedges, gardens, junk, or exotic landscaping are full of personality, as if the
inside of the house is spilling outward. Of course they caught my eye. I was particularly drawn, as most
curious humans are, in the evening when the light inside illuminates the house within. I’m equally
horrified and amazed by occupants that unabashedly live in the glow of a giant open window. How
bold (or naive?). It brought me to another area of interest regarding the home, the othering of domestic
space. To be on the wrong side of the door. In the darkness and the silence, the houses beckon.

"Je verrai vos maisons
comme des vers luisants
au creux des collines"

“I shall see your house
like fireflies
in the hollow of the hills.”

-Hélène Morange, Asphodèles et pervenches (in Bachelard 55)

In the Poetics of Space, Bachelard refers to a lighted lamp in the window as the house’s eye, the
gaze that reaches back out to the observer. It “keeps vigil, therefor it is vigilant. And the narrower the
ray of light, the more penetrating its vigilance” (Bachelard 54). I feel that sentiment when I walk
around this city at night. I feel as both an observer and the one observed. There is even a subtle guilt I
feel, walking on a sidewalk, looking at peoples homes. It definitely feels strange taking pictures of them.

37

Fig. 19: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Pretending to sleep, 2021, 72 x 66 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

Pretending to sleep is the first work I made in this new exploration and the first large work at six
feet tall. I wanted this painting to be big. It needed to be. It took me quite a while to find this house, as
I am very selective about the ones I photograph, but I knew it right away. I came to it first for its porch
lights–the penetrating vigilance–reaching out into the night. And in the growing darkness, its fence
felt like teeth. This home seemed so alive and I wanted to emphasise that sensation with paint. Not

38

embellish or add things, in fact I actually eliminated many details, blurring and burying architectural
flourishes and decorative plants. Instead I built it forwards with thick areas of impasto paint, for I
wanted to replicate the feel of this house. Its dominating presence. I used a rather assaulting toxic
yellow as the underpainting so that even with all the darkness, a sense of the glow would remain. I
continued to bike by this house for several months as I painted this work, hoping that observing the
real thing would solve my painting problems, but as an entity, it remained unfamiliar, and I was
entranced15 with each visit. When I titled this piece Pretending to sleep, it was not about the occupants
inside, I titled it for the house itself.

15

The root word of entranced is entrance.

39

Fig. 20: Lacey Jane Wilburn, In this town, we pull chipped teeth , 2021, 54 x 42 in. Oil on canvas.
© Lacey Jane Wilburn

It is impractical to be an artist painting houses in Vancouver and not address the housing and
affordability crisis. Though my research is concerned with the emotional centres that are lived in, I’m
finding myself becoming more aware of literal vacancies. This next work is of one of my favourite
houses in Kitsilano. I biked by it every day for months. It is a charming, slightly squat two-story. The
paint is peeling, some windows are cracked, but you can tell it has those “good bones” realtors like to

40

upsell. In any other city, I would be pooling my savings together for a down-payment to make this
chipped shell my own beloved home. But we are in Vancouver. At just land value, this house is worth
millions. And it is empty. The subject of a will-dispute, this house has been hovering in purgatory
between demolition contract and being inhabited, so now it is neither. A house full of nothing but the
vapours of familial hatred. I’m not sure why but this house has that magic pull. I still bike past it to
make sure that it is there. Over several months I photographed it in all the times of light to see when it
sang the sweetest. At night with the little porch light on, at dusk surrounded by the deep velvet sky, and
in high sun when its flaws were most exposed. Dawn won. It shared an equal amount of all the parts
that I love, the chips, the light, that indescribable pull. Drawing from what I learned with the previous
works, I liberally applied paint into textural mounds, building the magic of this house in through the
paint. This started to signal a new direction, one that relied less on the accuracy of photographic
rendering, and more on an inventive and imaginative pursuit. Why hide that bright pink
underpainting? What if I let that colour breathe through the sidewalk, the plants, and the sky? By
permitting layers of pink and orange to surface and submerge amongst this image, it created a new
sense of motion and vitality in the exterior atmosphere. In the final stage, it is the house that remains
the most still, as I imagine it waiting to be inhabited again.

41

The Bedroom:
exposing intimacy

“All intimacy hides from view.”
Bachelard (109)

Adjacent to all of this work and research is my practice in the public realm. For over ten years I
have collaboratively created murals, each project very site-specific, designed after arrival, community
engagement and research of local historical, cultural and environmental concerns. Each work tries to
respond to a social issue while also celebrating the unique heartbeat of that community. I came to do
my masters to decide what I want to say artistically when I am untethered to a place, when the work
follows me, is made by me alone, and does not have to conform to public opinion, municipal funding,
send messages of hope, or follow general social propriety. It came on slow, but when released from the
public world, I embraced the private.

Hidden amongst the secrets of the private world is the emotional space of intimacy, which is
much more difficult to make public (Tuan 147). I agree that intimacy is shy, at least, true intimacy.
Raw intimacy. Perhaps the delicate petals of vulnerability are too soft to be seen and they can only be
felt. When granted a carte blanche to create a mural in Kelowna this summer, I proposed a concept my
collaborative partner and I had not yet explored, to make the private public. To create a mural not of a
social issue local to the community, but something deeply personal about family, love, loneliness, and
guilt. When pandemic restrictions eased in the summer, I was able to visit my Grandfather Ronald for
the first time in over a year. He has been widowed for almost a decade, and lives in one of those “elderly
apartments” that make me so uncomfortable. They are designed with an impending temporariness, a
blank design that seems to say “you won’t be here for long.” I spent a long time with him, wanting to
understand how he had passed the pandemic year–what his own interiority was like. I asked if I could

42

follow him around, photographing him and how he spent the average day. In his tiny one bedroom
unit each day was quiet and simple, transitioning from the kitchen to his chair, watching day-time
television and the news, staring out the window, making coffee or tea. Occasional phone calls.
Occasional conversations with the neighbours. I became overwhelmed with a sense of waiting, and a
deeper sense of what an isolated year means to someone with less time left. In photographing my
grandfather, I realised the voyeuristic thrill of private space dissolves when you have something to lose.

Fig. 21: LALA (Lacey Jane Wilburn and Layla Folkmann), A comfortable silence, 2021, 2,700 square feet, acrylic on
brick, Kelowna, BC. © Lacey Jane Wilburn and Layla Folkmann

43

Working publicly on this project posed a new question, what happens when intimacy is
exposed, the personal made public? While painting this mural locals often asked if he was someone
famous or historical, but all scepticism and inquiry vanished the moment I said he was my grandfather.
Even after saying he does not live here, nor is he from this town; the familial love opened up an
understanding that transcended place into space. This distinction comes from Tuan where he claims
that place is more physical and space remains an abstract idea until we understand it better and endow
value upon it (6). Which means that Kelowna is a place, my home is a place, but this project of my
Grandfather is a space. One that can be grasped from anywhere.

It meant a lot to me to paint this work two-stories high to give visibility to a social reality that
is often politely ignored. That in western society, we hide our elderly from view. I wanted to include
some of his objects in this work, for they occupy a large part of his day. I elected not to show the display
cabinet, with mementos and wedding photos, those are too curated. I wanted his daily objects, within
reach. Kleenex, coffee, the remote, toffee candies. These are the objects most imprinted by his hands.
Perhaps most aligned with my decision is the following thought:

Objects anchor time. They need not, of course, be personal possessions. We can try to
reconstruct our past with brief visits to our old neighbourhood and the birthplaces of our
parents….Personal possessions are perhaps more important for old people. They are too weary
to define their sense of self by projects and action; their social world shrinks and with it the
opportunities to proclaim fair deeds; and they may be too fragile to visit places that hold for
them fond memories. Personal possessions–old letters and the family settee–remain as
accessible comforts, the flavor of times past hovering about them (Tuan 187-188).

This comment articulates so much about this small domestic world of my Grandfather, the
shrinking of the social world, distilled down to a few key mementos in a boxed house. He loves sharing
them with me: family history books, photographs, ceramic figurines he bought travelling. These things
really do anchor time, in a similar way to how Breonna Taylor’s objects anchored Jennifer Packer. They
serve as tangible connections to lived experience. Painting representational things, whether objects,

44

humans or even landscape has a way of preserving them, and in turn can give agency. Things often
overlooked become exceptional when transformed through creative labour, for these painterly
representations can take weeks, months sometimes years. It is a way of gifting time, care and attention
back to ephemeral moments. Whether these meaningful moments come from a simple object, an
empty hallway, or a polite conversation in an impersonal room.

Fig. 22: LALA (Lacey Jane Wilburn and Layla Folkmann), A comfortable silence, 2021, 2,700 square feet, acrylic on
brick, Kelowna, BC. © Lacey Jane Wilburn and Layla Folkmann

As his granddaughter though, I wish his home had more. I wish the energy in it was getting
fuller, not leaking away. He is surrounded by his chosen objects and comforts, but not one of them can
replace a human. Our objects may reveal us, but they are not us. What do our objects say about us in
our absence? They say we are absent.

45

The Kitchen:
the soul of the abode

If the eye of the house is the lamp in the window, then the heart beats in the kitchen. Whether
one that is messy, smelly, and full of yelling chaos, or one that is quietly immaculate with neatly stacked
dishware, the kitchen is quite simply, the most essential room in the house. It is where the life is (so
much more than the ill-named “living room” which should really be the “lounging room”). Even
raucous parties all seem to end up in the kitchen. But what happens to this centre of life and
nourishment when the house is a lonely place, quiet and silent with no guests to feed? Does this empty
heart still beat? In wandering my halls and domestic spaces looking for senses of human presence, I
found myself at the fridge.

We often do not observe the inside of the fridge. We look in it for something to eat, but it isn’t
often admired for its potential as a site for aesthetic inquiry, even less as a work of art. Even just leaving
the door open begins to impede its function, this one in particular was protesting my visual
investigations with a ceaseless melody of irritated beeping. Resulting in an equally irritated artist
continuously opening and closing the door, but unwilling to quit on this image as a subject (another
reason for photography being an excellent tool when composing an image). I was compelled to make
this image during a long isolated stretch for I realised my fridge had become my closest pandemic
friend. I visited it multiple times a day. At night, with its commanding artificial glow and bursting with
a pandemic supply of food, there is perhaps no higher authority in the house. It rumbles like a human
and it summons like a fire.

46

Fig. 23: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Sleepwalking, 2021, 54 x 42 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

The personified authority of the fridge becomes justified when you look back in domestic
history. In the 1840’s, food preparation and consumption was forever transformed by a rather
industrious, but drastically simple new product: a block of ice (Bryson 90). Most notably, it completely
transformed America in the application of ice to refrigerate railway cars, allowing meat and perishables
to be transported from coast to coast in a time when milk would spoil in mere hours and chickens
needed to be consumed the day they were plucked (Bryson 94). This globalised the food trade and in

47

every modern household it remains no less a marvel today. It is quite unfathomable for me to consider
how my domestic life would upend without a common refrigerator, especially when told to isolate
indoors. As I contemplated this essential object, I decided to paint it the way I felt about it, as a “still
life” which is not still at all. I began with a fire-hot orange underpainting that I retained to seep up
through the wood floor and the door of the fridge, giving a heat to this work, not in temperature per
say, but in a sense of urgency. With this painting, I wanted to remove the sense of the figure, (ie. myself)
clearly responsible for opening this door, but generate an animism that suggests this object retains its
own agency; that perhaps the door is not left open but is reaching; the food inside lively and
conversing, maybe even taunting or tempting the viewer. My intent in rendering this painting was less
aimed at the decadent whimsy of the food paintings of American Wayne Thiebaud (see Fig 28) and
more interested in the somewhat suspenseful excess of one of my absolute favourite paintings, Motte de
Beurre (Mound of Butter), 1875-85 by French realist Antoine Vollon (Fig 29).

Figure removed due to copyright restrictions. Image can be accessed at:
http://www.artnet.com/artists/wayne-thiebaud/untitled-cupcake-ihASay4Ca2rCU-DchHjanA2

Fig 24: Wayne Thiebaud, Untitled (Cupcake), circa 2001, 6 7/8 x 8 7/8 in. Oil and graphite on paper.
© Wayne Thiebaud. Nevada Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of Christie's auction house.

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Fig 25: Antoine Vollon, Motte de Beurre (Mound of Butter), 1875-1885, 24 x 19.7 in. Oil on canvas. National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C., online collection. Public Domain.

Our food not only sustains us, it can describe us. The inside of a fridge can be a portrait of the
household. In fact, just the invention of the fridge, along with colanders, can-openers, vegetable
crispers, bread trays, dessert forks, lemon zesters, martini glasses–really, alcohol at all–signify how far
we have removed ourselves from the survivalist nature of our animal counterparts. We do not just eat,
we dine. Brunch, afternoon tea, happy hour, midnight snacks, the kitchen is used as much for pleasure
as it is for necessity, and even in a pandemic, the kitchen remains the heart of the house. Perhaps just
with fewer beats.

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The Attic

solitude.”16

tranquil

to a more

the mark of ascension

For they bear

and more primitive.

which are steeper

the attic stairs,

we always go up

“Lastly,

16

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (46-47). Poetic manipulation is my own.

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The
Attic. Oh
the attic. It’s difficult to pull the
hatch of the attic stairs, the creaky splintered
boards have memory. They want to curl back up inside without
permitting entrance. The musty smell, however, the dark and the dust are as
comforting as they are uninviting. It speaks of loneliness. There is privacy here, this is
not a space for entertainment. One often goes to the attic alone.

In visualising a large house, I always imagine them with attics. Even long before I lived in a
house with one. They offer such a sense of mystery, of mischief and magic and secrets begging to be
unearthed. The attic offers the largest space for an adventurous imagination. When I paint a portrait I
am trying to show more than the surface of the sitter. In painting houses, I am trying to share a deeper
connection, a social one, one that speaks about humanity, about emotions, love, tension, unease and
even boredom all rolling along the same musty carpets. But in researching the psychological spaces of
the house, I also found something about me. Something personal and private, about my own secrets
and habits that I hoarded away upstairs. It came from a passage in the Poetics of Space. Please pay close
attention to this next part:

If I were to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the
house shelters daydreaming,
the house protects the dreamer,
the house allows one to dream in peace.
Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that
belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths.
-Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (28)

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This quote electrifies every atom in my body. As if 64 years in the past Bachelard knew exactly
why I would be drawn to houses. The maladaptive daydreaming seizure is a troubling sight to witness,
and more embarrassing for me to be seen. It makes private spaces necessary for me. It also echos my
sensations of painting in the studio compared to painting murals in public. My studio work is
ensconced; sheltered, and private. The sensation of interiority is reflected in the process. All of my oil
painting pleasures, labour and struggles are done deep in thought, in solitude, spending as much time
inwards in myself as in the studio. I spend more than half my creative time only looking and thinking, a
privilege not permitted with murals due to limited sunlight, demanding municipal timelines, and a
collaborative partner that likely would not appreciate exactly how much time I could spend not
painting. Interiority is how I make a painting. I close out the outside world, absorb myself in the tasks
ahead, mixing paint, gessoing canvas, revisiting old and new inspirations, moving paintings around,
finding the right music, setting the stage for the process, and of course, maladaptively visualising my
way through the work to come.

This imaginative field brings me to my favourite wonder of art; that a painting is just a dirty
piece of cloth. Mucked upon fabric, yet with certain colours, tones and stains can transport us, make us
feel something visceral, can touch or repulse us. The magic where eyes, mind and heart combine. That
is how I conceived this second to last work, Watchdogs. A piece that is not about intimate experience,
but an imaginative dreamscape within my domestic domain. Somepart still life, somepart landscape,
this work is unabashedly pulling from the fascination I have been uncovering in houses, seeing how
much mystery I can make in the dissolving darkness of paint. Tuan claims that “dramatisation makes
human places vividly real,” (178) with which I agree. I use drama to ground my paintings, to suspend
moments with silence built through contrast and illumination. To let the mood make narratives out of
objects. This is how I can make a rather ludicrous idea of painting plastic flamingos feel urgent and
suspenseful. As Bachelard claims “there will always be more things in a closed, than in an open box. To
verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience” (108). This is

52

why children are scared of closed closets. Why it is scarier to not look. The imagination will take us to
places untethered by human reality. I have found many quiet moments of intrigue in the rooms of my
empty house, but it feels appropriate now to open the door and let a little more magic in. To step
outside on this journey, using paint to transform my front yard into my own garden of earthly delights.

Fig. 26: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Watchdogs, 2022, 48 x 66 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

53

Exit through the side door

The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

Never would I have guessed that in studying houses I would arrive at my own neurological
condition. That these “gentle,” “feminine,” and “lightweight” subjects could be historical, reflect social
realities and yet also be autobiographical. Paintings of the interior do so much more than describe
domestic space. They act as documentation of the world we live in, and serve as ledgers of interior
thought. They allow private experiences and emotions to be made visible to an audience that may exist
long after we are gone. As Borzello states, “empires rise and fall, wars bring heartbreak and horror,
continents and computers are discovered, but these images tell us that through it all, women play the
piano, men drink wine and children crawl upon the carpet, that this family inhabited a starkly elegant
interior, that one felt at home in clutter (10). These paintings talk about what it means to be human
(Borzello 10). When I uncovered the parallel between interior space and interior thought, I brought my
maladaptive experiences onto the canvas with me. Which is why I brought it into this thesis as well. My
condition cultivates an enormous imaginative space, one that has room for any and everything I wish
to conceive. It is swirling, organic, undefined and edgeless. Tangible, but in motion, undulating and
evolving. With this final work, Lukewarm, a construction completely of my own design, I let the paint
flow through and dominate this rendered environment, the vibrant paint underneath threatening to
push through and dissolve the perception of this bathroom. It creates a slippage and submersion
between order and chaos, beauty and discomfort, reality and daydreams. To me, it is not necessary to
know that this is an imagined space, for it is an identifiable space, a familiar, but private space balanced
on the precipice of the discernible and the ephemeral. The paint is describing how I feel about this
space, how my maladaptive mind considers these lived in environments- alive, pulsing, and full of every
moment that came both before and after this one. I paint how I think, how I feel, and how I see when
my eyes are looking inward. If I was to reevaluate the term shelter in place, I think it struck me so much
because I have always sheltered in place. Painting is my shelter. The place is me.

54

Fig. 27: Lacey Jane Wilburn, Lukewarm, 2022. 66 x 72 in. Oil on canvas. © Lacey Jane Wilburn

55

Housekeeping (bibliography)

1. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. 2014 ed., Penguin Random House, Translated
by M. Jolas. 2014.
2. Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life Illustrated Edition. 2013. Doubleday
Canada, Toronto. Book.
3. Buzwell, Greg. Daughters of decadence: the New Woman in the Victorian fin de siècle. The
British Library. 15 May 2014. Web, accessed Retrieved 9 Dec 2021.
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/daughters-of-decadence-the-new-woman
-in-the-victorian-fin-de-siecle
4. Borzello, Frances. At Home: The Domestic Interior In Art. 2006. Thames and Hudson,
London. Book.
5. Doig, Peter with Tom Powers. The Q Interview: Episode 23: Peter Doig. CBC Podcasts.
Retrieved 13 Feb 2022
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1025-the-q-interview/episode/15888536-episode-23peter-doig?share=true
6. Kitts, Thomas Jefferson. Advice on painting from John Singer Sargent. Excerpt from John
Sargent by the Hon. Evan Charteris, K. C., Scribner’s & Sons, 1927.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9fDHo2DZt1JaFUydU96dHIteTA/view
7. Kuiper, Kathleen. Cecilia Beaux, Encyclopædia Britannica Online, Retrieved 9 Dec 2021. Web.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cecilia-Beaux
8. Loureiro, João. Vancouver Novel. Vancouver Biennale.com. Retrieved, 9 Dec 2021. Web video.
https://www.vancouverbiennale.com/artworks/vancouver-novel/
9. Oxford Languages. https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/
10. Packer, Jennifer. Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing. Serpentine Galleries.
Video. Retrieved 13 Feb 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvNsqtsKTQU&t=97s

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11. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Cezanne’s Doubt. The Merleau-Ponty aesthetics reader: philosophy
and painting. Northwestern University Press, Evanston. 1993. Book.
12. Reeves, Ben. A Boat Made of Ocean. Equinox Gallery. Instagram live video. 17 Nov 2021.
13. Tuan, Yi-fu. Space and Place : The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press,
1977. Book.
14. Young, Emma. People with “Maladaptive Daydreaming” spend an average of four hours a day
lost in their daydreams. The British Psychology Society Research Digest. 25 Jun 2008. Web.
Retrieved 20 Mar 2022.
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/06/25/people-with-maladaptive-daydreaming-spend-an-averag
e-of-four-hours-a-day-lost-in-their-imagination/

57