Tightly wound up in the idea of home is our sense of belonging. Home is a geographical anchor, but it also signals how we fit in or stand out – rooms refract our relationships to society, culture and class. As we construct our interiors around us, we construct our sense of ourselves. But more than ever, the idea of the interior has taken on a life of its own beyond our dwellings.

In this Ockham Residential lecture, writer and curator Emma Ng will look at the image-world of interiors: the amorphous cloud of ideas that we encounter constantly through e-commerce, Instagram feeds, Airbnb listings, and even Netflix shows. On the printed page and in backlit pixels, what visions of domesticity are sold to us — and what fantasies do we sell ourselves?

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Emma Ng is a writer and curator living in Wellington, where she’s worked with The Dowse Art Museum, Pātaka Art + Museum and Te Papa Tongarewa, as well as Enjoy Public Art Gallery, where she was the curator and manager between 2014-2016. Emma has contributed to outlets like The Pantograph Punch, ArtAsiaPacific and Hyperallergic, and book projects for New York’s Urban Design Forum and Phaidon. She studied design and art history at Victoria University and has a master’s degree in design research and criticism from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Emma is also the author of Old Asian, New Asian, published in 2017 by BWB Texts.