In Home for Ghosts and Letting Go, Gail Ritchie explores the home as a place where the familiar and the unsettling coexist. These works originate from her larger project, Im/Material Monument, which considers how the Northern Ireland Troubles might be remembered — or whether commemoration is even possible. But in these particular pieces, the scale of reflection becomes personal. The works turn toward the private spaces where grief, fear, and memory settle quietly into the architecture of everyday life.
For Ritchie, the door forms the core of this inquiry. Growing up during the Troubles, doors were never simply objects; they were psychological thresholds charged with meaning. A door could keep danger out or hold safety within, but it could also generate fear — especially when someone knocked unexpectedly in the night. In many homes, deciding who would open the door became its own moment of tension, revealing how domestic life was shaped by uncertainty and constant vigilance. These experiences left what the artist describes as “psychological footprints”.
This lived understanding of the door as a liminal, emotionally loaded space is central to Home for Ghosts. The sculpture first appears familiar: a hearth, a mantelpiece, pictures, and doors suggesting rooms beyond. But as the viewer moves around the piece, spatial coherence collapses. The doors open not to comforting interiors but to a claustrophobic chamber containing a single chair, suspended upside down above the viewer’s head. This inversion transforms the home into something uncanny — a place both intimate and unsettling, where one feels simultaneously at home and not at home.
The suspended chair becomes a seat for “the ghost”: the lingering trace of memories, unresolved histories, and emotional residues that inhabit domestic spaces long after events have passed. The viewer stands between thresholds, caught between the warmth of a recognisable interior and the disquieting chamber behind it. The work invites us to confront how the places we live in are shaped by what is spoken and unspoken, held and concealed, remembered and forgotten.
Letting Go, by contrast, emerges from a personal moment of sudden bereavement. Although the polished black granite echoes the visual language of memorials, the engraved text is intimate, ambiguous, and stripped of public markers like names or dates. The piece moves from the interior of the home toward the sea — a symbolic passage from containment to release. It reflects on the emotional labour of handling what remains after a death: objects, ashes, and the overwhelming question of what to do with them. The work holds the tension between holding on and letting go, between private mourning and the need to return something to the wider world.
Together, Home for Ghosts and Letting Go position the threshold as an emotional, psychological, and temporal space. They explore how we cross and re-cross the thresholds of memory, loss, and belonging. Ritchie’s works remind us that the homes we return to — or build — are shaped not just by walls and doors, but by the ghosts we live with, the ghosts we release, and the ghosts we become.
