The House We Grew Up In

The House We Grew Up In, a solo exhibition by Caroline Stephen, presents a body of work that foregrounds domestic space as a visual and psychological structure, an architecture through which commercial value and childhood memories are stored. Moving between photography and sculpture, Stephen reframes the house not as setting, but as medium. It acts as a built environment that both contains and performs interior life.

The exhibition includes six platinum palladium prints, each mounted behind wooden dollhouse windows. The use of a historically “precious” process shifts the register of otherwise unremarkable domestic images sourced from Zillow, assigning a level of care and permanence that exceeds their original function. The photographs become small contained environments where distance is negotiated through form, and worth is challenged through process.

This inquiry into the photographic structure extends to Dollhouse, a 1:12 scale sculptural work in which emulsion lifts of Zillow interiors, applied to plexi surfaces, replace walls in a traditional wooden dollhouse. Here the photographic surface becomes a component of the architecture: the emulsion surfaces are thin, unstable, and ephemeral. The house is an index of fragility, its interior legible only through partially ruined and translucent commercial imagery. 

The titular work, The House We Grew Up In, shifts the dollhouse from conceptual structure to lived imagery. Constructed from worn plywood and furnished with objects and dolls from the 1930s, each room stages a domestic scene in which familiar situations are represented through incongruous details. Drawing on the usage of dollhouses in child therapy, this work displaces psychological narrative into spatial form, transforming the act of play into a method of reconstruction and control.

Stephen examines scale and containment as formal strategies. The miniature is not treated as nostalgic, but as a mechanism of compression, an architecture of distillation, where psychological weight is translated into structural proportion.