No Place Like Home is a collaborative work by Broken Home Collective (Alison Lowry from Northern Ireland, Olga Turetska from Ukraine, Linda Norris from Wales, Maria Scarognina and Silvia Levenson, from Italy. The work interrogates the notion of ‘home’ as a safe space for women and children and illuminates the fact that many women and children live in fear in their own homes, whether due to gender based violence or war, and was displayed at the International Festival of Glass in Stourbridge, UK, in August/September 2024.
Broken Home Collective came together in 2023 to create opportunities to collaborate as activist artists, to amplify and enrich their personal voices, and to support and encourage each other in the use of glass as a medium to highlight and protest for social and political justice.
Some 47,000 women and girls worldwide were killed by their intimate partners or other family members in 2020. This means that, on average, a woman or girl is killed by someone in her own family every 11 minutes (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report 2021). An estimated 160,000 children in England are currently living in households where domestic abuse is taking place (Women’s Aid, 2024) . Using art to draw attention to this issue is the aim of the Broken Home Collective. We come from all over Europe and the epidemic of violence against women is the same everywhere.
Drawn together by their desire to use the fragility, versatility and storytelling potential of glass to make work that fights and illuminates injustice, and with the natural spirit of camaraderie and sharing that takes place among women and among the close-knit, intimate and generous international world of artists who work with glass, in the process of making this work the artists developed strong friendships and shared experiences. The contribution of Olga Turetska from Ukraine was formative: “Olga lives in a country at war and has found the energy and strength to create pieces that tell stories of homes broken not by gender violence, but by bombs. Olga put this project in a different context that made us think deeply.” Silvia Levenson
Broken Home Collective covered the costs of assembling and presenting the work at The International Festival of Glass (IFOG) in Stourbridge in August 2024 by crowdfunding. Crowdfunding was a democratic and accessible way of enabling the artist’s friends, neighbours, social media followers and the glass making community and industry to support their initiative. The artists are extremely grateful for the generosity of everyone who supported them and who made it possible for them to present their work at IFOG and for Olga to come to UK from Ukraine to participate in the presentation. They would also like to thank The International Festival of Glass for inviting them to show the work.
Broken Home are currently looking for international opportunities to show No Place Like Home, and are planning their next collaboration. since making No Place Like Home, the Collective has now expanded to include Roberta de Caro (Italy/London), Nuria Torrente (Spain) and Maria Eugenia Díaz de Vivar (Argentina).
Availability
No Place Like Home is for sale for £3000, (in-line with their commitment to support women experiencing violence in their homes, Broken Home Collective will donate 50% of the proceeds to be divided equally between Women’s Aid UK and a charity supporting women affected by the war in Ukraine). To buy No Place Like Home please click here.
All workshop photos by Paolo Sacchi