A home holds more than furniture. It collects habits, memories and the small traces people leave behind. It can offer comfort, but also boredom, tension or a sense of being contained. Designer Henry Holland explores those competing feelings in There’s No Place Like It, his exhibition for the Royal Society of Sculptors in London.
The show brings together sculpture by the society’s members, with artists including Abigail Norris, Nick Hornby, Poojan Gupta, Michael Coombs and Dido Crosby. Their work approaches domestic life through details we might otherwise overlook: shoes by a door, hair caught in a brush, keepsakes whose significance makes sense only to their owner. These familiar starting points open up more personal questions about belonging and the spaces we inhabit.
“I was really looking for pieces that made me feel something,” Holland told Wallpaper*.
That emotional response guides a selection that moves between humour, tenderness and unease. Holland describes home as a feeling, leaving room for interpretations that reach beyond a building or an address. The works consider how ordinary possessions can become extensions of people, relationships and experiences.
Sculpture gives those ideas a physical presence. Recognisable objects and domestic references become material for artists to reshape, inviting viewers to reconsider something they thought they already understood. A familiar detail can feel reassuring in one context and unsettling in another.
For designers and creatives, that is perhaps the exhibition’s most useful proposition. Everyday objects already carry associations; creative work can draw them out, complicate them or give them a different meaning. The things that make a space feel personal are often the details a perfectly styled image leaves out.
The setting adds another layer. The exhibition forms part of the Royal Society of Sculptors’ Year of the Home, marking 50 years at Dora House following sculptor Cecil Thomas’s gift of the building to the society.
There’s No Place Like It runs at Dora House, 108 Old Brompton Road, London, until 28 November 2026. Admission is free, Monday to Saturday, 11am–5pm
