In the 2022 reality TV series Instant Dream Home, unwitting contestants have their homes radically made over in just 12 hours. Alterations of nightmarish proportions, from house extensions to room remodelling, are completed alongside full cosmetic makeovers by a cast of hundreds of tradespeople. The 12-hour timeframe is bookended by a ferocity of homeware consumption. It begins with the en masse dumping of homeowner belongings, as furniture, appliances and domestic detritus are emptied from the house, destined for the bin. In the final minutes before the reveal, TVs are mounted and kitset furniture constructed in rapid fire, and workers form assembly lines to pump vast supplies of cushions, throws and decorative vessels into place.

How to make a home considers the advent of the modern interior – first emerging in the 19th century, as industrialisation brought with it a wave of mass-produced consumer goods. Today, interiors are fetishised through mass media and curated digital content as both an intimate space of family and retreat, walled off from the outside turmoil of daily life, and a staged and ever-changing environment designed to communicate status and identity.

Set within an exhibition design inspired by domestic architecture, How to make a home explores the small universe of home and the material politics of the objects and adornment we live with over time. Responses to dwelling by 14 artists, makers and designers build impressions of private life backdropped by the anxieties of contemporary consumerism and housing instability.

How to make a home takes us from the rise of designer culture to the waste streams of fast interiors, positing that what makes a home is neither opulence nor good taste. Rather, it is the persistence of things that inspire us to feel like we belong.