Homeless
Homeless hangs in the Bendigo Art Gallery (
Bendigo Art Gallery Website) a neighbour of LMHS in View Street, our building the historic Temperance Hall being erected at a similar time to the original gallery.
Homeless was painted by Kennington in late Victorian England, commissioned by benefactors as one of a series of paintings ( 'homeless', 'orphans' and 'a pinch of poverty') that were to capture and highlight the dominant social evils of the world's first mega polis, and the world's first urban decaying settlement as a result.
The social justice movement that led to the suffragette movement, the ongoing by now internationally focused emancipationist movement, the beginnings of socially just religious movements were all afoot in the London of the day, as was rampant examples of all urban social evils, in a society that for the first time was maturely reliant on an industrialised working class, with for the first time, access to a meager disposable income, with access to, for the first time, a printed popular press, and for the first time, an opportunity for a socially aware rising middle class to send a message as it were, through the clash and collision of all of these factors, to send a warning via lithographed depictions of Kennington's paintings in the popular press of the evils of homelessness and poverty.
Historically Kennington's painting was created to be the base by which concerned citizens could send a message to a wide population, via the popular press, about these dominant social evils.
The painting and the lithographed depictions were the medium for a strong message.
It seems appropriate some 12,000 miles away and a century later, into a new millennium, that we continue to use Kennington's Homeless image, using different technology, to send the same message again. For homelessness and poverty and all of its travelling companions still stalk our young, our elderly our fragile and our disabled, regardless of how our governments of the day would demonise and label them.
Kennington's work has a proud lineage and artistic merit, but from a social justice perspective it has even greater standing, LMHS is proud to use it in a different setting, via different means in a different place and time, to remind us all that homelessness is an endemic problem, a historical problem, one that is entrenched in society, but one that nonetheless needs and deserves a sensible response.
Our work at Loddon Mallee Housing Services is based in a strong and proud tradition of dealing with an historically difficult and entrenched symptom of urbanised societies, and whilst we update the imagery of homelessness with more modern faces from time to time, the powerful symbolism remains.