The Way We Live

Visit this exhibition exploring what home means to us

As Plymouth embarks on a defining new era of regeneration, this exhibition uses archival collections, sculpture, installation, painting, photography and film to explore ideas of home, housing and community and consider the wider debate about how we want to live in the future. Explore how home shapes your identity. How does it make you feel safe? How does it provide the space for you to be creative?

Curator Beth Hughes has brought together a number of leading contemporary artists including Do Ho Suh, Rachel Whiteread, Jasleen Kaur, Caroline Walker, Anne Tallentire, Hetain Patel, Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Gavin Turk, alongside new commissions by photographer Hannah Starkey and artist Jacqui Poncelet. The artists all approach the idea of home from different perspectives, revealing it to be much more than a physical space.

Other works consider the sights, sounds, smells and textures of home, the impact of technology on domestic life, and the ways that our homes can become expressions of who we are, while archival images from The Box’s collections highlight the architecture of houses in Plymouth and people in their homes.

You can also see: a newly rescanned and restored version of Craigie’s ‘The Way We Live’ film (1946), new commissions by three emerging photographers and a display focusing on planner Patrick Abercrombie and Plymouth City engineer and surveyor James Paton Watson’s ambitious ‘A Plan for Plymouth’ (1943).

10am-5pm Tuesday-Sunday (3pm on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve).
Please check The Box’s website for up-to-date festive opening hours.