A Two Story House: Stories from Quarantine

Years ago we found the Tammy Wynette and George Jones song called Two Story House that tickled our fancy and seemed to describe our situation.

We’ve always loved houses, both real and conceptual. For us they are a structure on which to hang our ideas, our desires, our relationships, our art. We shake pieces of our lives out and hang them in different rooms, seeing how something looks in the laundry room versus on the front porch versus in the basement. We’ve also thought a lot about what it is for a building to be a home or a house – how are these concepts different?

 Now, in the midst of a pandemic, we find ourselves self-isolated in an old empty two-story house in London. We are both surprised at our good fortune, and know that we’ve always been lucky fuckers. We’ve been here just over a week in this big house and we are telling ourselves it’s a residency.

This world crisis has left us wanting to do nothing except survive right now. We want to sit down for a bit and not feel compelled into a place of productivity, not feel compelled to instantly translate our lives and work and relationships to the internet. We want to think about what it means to show up when you can’t go out. And we want to invite you to join us in this, holding space for one another to reconsider the homes, both metaphorical and physical, we have built, and how a pandemic changes those structures, shows us where the construction was shoddy and where it was expertly done.

 We’ve decided to consolidate our musings here, in our blog. Over the coming weeks we are going to move through the different rooms of our house, and the different activities we do in this new home, like letting you in on some of the work we had been doing on Last Gasp. We hope you’ll come along - there’s plenty of room!