Imagining the Home: A practice based critical investigation into the western frontier domestic space and its mediated form

This practice-based enquiry questions the narrative positioning of the home within Western films created between 1920 and the early 1960s. It seeks to juxtapose the reality of the home in the construction of the US West with its subsequent mediated representation through film and popular cultural narratives. The interdisciplinary practice engages these concerns using archive material, film stills and the researcher’s own photographic images in the medium of the quilt, breaking the traditional frame and opening up tactile avenues for visual storytelling. The quilt reflects pre-industrial methods of construction. The use of expanded photography – the construction of a mutual relationship between photography and other art or craft practices in order to shift cultural perceptions of the discipline – removes film from its linear narrative and highlights the tropes and conventions of domestic space in the Western film and the historical landscape.

Focusing on narratives that reflect the period of US expansion and settlement in the second half of the nineteenth century, the thesis argues that the frontier home was fundamental not only to the historical mapping and settlement of the US West, but also to the re-enactment of that settlement within the Western film. Importantly, the research leads to the development of a discourse that highlights how the re-presentation of the home in Western film engages ideological imperatives at the time of the film’s production, such that these films draw upon mythological and technological constraints that reflect current and prevalent attitudes and prejudices. Reflecting upon the home as a gendered space, the work engages with codes relating to the cinematic role of women within such films to identify and reveal stylistic tropes and filmic conventions used within the interior mise-en-scène, where female characters are placed in roles that typically act as a support for the male protagonist. This body of work therefore seeks to question the populist perception and importance of the home in the ‘Wild West’.

The accompanying written thesis presents practice and theory as distinct but interwoven concerns, which are manifest as parallel discourses: one written in the first person, and one written in the third person. The reader is left to negotiate these personal and academic voices, both of which reflect a critical understanding of the importance of the domestic space in Western films.