‘This has been my shelter’: Powerful exhibition spotlights artists with experience of insecure housing

Outside In is an organisation that enables artists facing significant barriers due to health, disability, social circumstance or isolation to create and share their work. Their new touring exhibition, Shelter, showcases many artists who have lived experience of insecure housing and homelessness. Here is a selection, with the artists explaining the inspiration behind their powerful pieces.

Helter-Shelter by Helen Grundy (digital collage) – main image

This work is inspired by my career in homeless services in Birmingham. For over a decade I have been supporting people to get out of homelessness. Having no home, no shelter creates a level of trauma and disconnection from the rest of society. Housing is a basic need. The hands holding the houses represent how out of reach affordable housing is. The helter-skelter ride shows people going round and round in the system only to be spat out at the bottom to start all over again. My work references Gee Vaucher’s album artwork for The Feeding of the 5000 by the anarcho-punk collective, Crass, and is a surreal representation of the corrupted system that does not protect the most vulnerable in society.

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The Medieval Brigand by Drew Fox (mixed media)

The artwork represents myself at the age of 20 and the nine years I spent living in a traditional gypsy bender tent. I travelled the country harvesting seasonal crops as an itinerant agricultural labourer while living in a travelling commune. The artwork includes the entirety of my possessions during this period, mainly of tools and items essential to living in a temporary shelter which would be set up, lived in for a matter of weeks before being taken down, moved and set up again. I constructed the shelter from a frame of hazel saplings with a canvas tarpaulin, and plastic tarpaulin as a top cover. My bed was set atop two pallets, and my heat was supplied by a wood burning stove I made from an old oil can.

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My Ideal Home by Christopher Hoggins (watercolour on cartridge paper)

At the time I painted this I was being thrown out of my home of 13 years and had just discovered that I was autistic. I have always wanted to live somewhere isolated, and a lighthouse fits the bill perfectly.

Inside Out by Andrew Harston

Earlier this year, amid a raft of life collapses I was left jobless, out of cash and broken down both literally and metaphorically, in my campervan. The council wanted to move me on, the van was fine where it stood as long as I wasn’t inside! I was blessed with community and chance leading me to turn to portraiture as my source of income. Each portrait I would do would be a part of a bigger piece, a self-portrait reflecting on the need for community, my own place within it and how we are all a part of each other’s lives. Though I am still finding my way, portraiture allowed me to keep my home on the road, connect deeply with many more people and find some form of meaning and direction! This has been my shelter.

Grow Heathrow by Isabelle Haythorn (acrylic on canvas board )

Grow Heathrow was squatted land occupied by a community of people who built their own off-grid homes in Sipson, West Drayton. It began in 2010 to protect the land from Heathrow Airport’s expansion plans and to provide shelter for those that needed it. The project aimed to provide a model for future non-hierarchical, consensus-based communities. The site was powered by solar panels and wind turbines. I stayed there intermittently and began a series of paintings of the hand-built homes. On 7 March 2021 we discovered that Grow Heathrow would be evicted the next day, so I took photos of the homes to preserve my memories of the beautiful site. This image shows two residents outside their home the evening before eviction, their belongings scattered across the ground. They faced the imminent loss of their shelter and their community.

Shelter opens at the end of June at The New Art Gallery Walsall and runs until 19 October before touring to Christie’s in London in January 2026.

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