Living Rooms by Sam Johnson-Schlee

Review by Phoebe T

Sam Johnson-Schlee’s first book, Living Rooms, is a meditation on the objects within a home, and on the strings which connect these objects to the outside world. At the heart of it is a willingness to examine familiar objects: the silly, the comfy, the luxurious, in order that their ‘deeper truth’ might be understood.

‘Hidden inside our homes,’ Johnson-Schlee writes, is the fact that, ‘our lives depend on one another; we live because of the work of others.’ With ties to the work of Marx, Freud, and Walter Benjamin, Living Roomswork is threaded with examples of connection to ‘the work of others’. A ‘Live Laugh Love’ fridge magnet is examined for the alienated work that made it, and the dreams of a successful life which first brought the phrase into being.

Even the design on custard cream biscuits, Johnson-Schlee explains, derives from a Victorian trend for swirling botanical patterns. This pattern, also seen in iron railings, itself derives from a Victorian fashion for plants enabled by the invention of the Wardian case: a terrarium-like contraption which had allowed Victorian colonisers to transport plants to places where they could be used in the violent exploitation of human labour.

At the book’s end, Johnson-Schlee imagines a world where we could ‘take threads and draw lines between every interaction, every instant of collective joy, every borrowed utensil and every shared loaf’. Living Rooms, itself, performs this work with eloquent enquiry: scrutinising our homes, looking closely at their fibres, and opening them out through their connections with the world.

Living Rooms is published by Peninsula Press, 3rd November 2022