Home is more than a place pairs artworks from the collection of Hamilton Gallery with works by contemporary Australian artists to broadly consider the meaning of home as both an external and internal experience.

The exhibition was borne out of the collective experience of lockdown during 2020 (‘stay at home’), but is also inspired by the history of Hamilton Gallery which began as a private collection in the homestead of Herbert and May Shaw. Together, the 15 pairings of artworks reflect everyday comforts and joys, but also comments on broader questions about belonging, migration, and the precariousness of home within the settler-colonial history of Australia.

By placing complementary and contrasting pieces alongside each other, the works in this digital exhibition invite you to consider how home is more than a physical place, and that its meaning is political as well as personal. The following text is written as if to take you through the imagined ‘rooms’ of a house, grouping pairs of works together based on their visual and conceptual connections.