NMB Meets Jodie House
We spoke to the brilliant Jodie House: artist, photographer and co-founder of Houseworks, a community interest company (CIC) delivering creative engagement to people in need.
Jodie House
Introduce yourself and tell us what you’re up to?
My background is in film and photography. I've been a photographer since I was 13 and I still use the same camera that I used then. I did street and documentary photography for about 20 years and went to Bournemouth University and did video and media production. And then we had our own production company.
I have been a community engagement artist for about 22 years now. I use creative projects as a vehicle to engage all sectors of the community. I work with children, young people and adults. With the value being that everybody should be able to access this really powerful resource [the creative process] and embed it into their lives as a daily practice.
Houseworks Dorset Arts - Afghan Resettlement session
What was the original idea for Houseworks and how has it developed?
I got involved in community based video production and then did youthwork training with an organization using film and photography to engage very very disengaged young people. After about 6 years I started my own CIC working with vulnerable people via media and creative stuff.
At Houseworks, we are essentially an engagement service which is very different in some ways to an arts organization. So the engagement part is the heavier part of what we do. It's ground-up work.
Jodie’s MySpaceMyPlace social documentary disposable camera project for refugee week in June 2025
I love your ‘Myspace’ project, tell me more?
MySpace is a disposable camera project I've been running for 18 years. It started as a way to get to know young people… who really had loads of issues, there were so many barriers, so I gave them disposable cameras as a way to engage with them.
It's now starting to be an archive, with hundreds or even thousands of images.
There's not that much funding available in the arts & culture sector, how do you do it?
So the funding we get tends to be social impact and not necessarily arts funding, around engaging communities rather than bringing art to people. Social impact money is so much easier to access than arts money, the outcomes are more obvious.
It's very challenging at times when you're plugging gaps, you're plugging social care gaps with engagement arts.
Current project (Discarded and Caught) as part of USA based Kolaj Institute Artist Practice Programme.
Do you see any intersections with sustainability in your work? Perhaps in terms of social justice issues? But, also I know in your work and I remember us talking about reuse and recycling of materials?
In the community we're a bit of a drop off point for recycled materials. It’s the recycling and sustainability stuff, but it's also part of poverty, which is a very real thing here with the community. The parents have a lot of barriers to buying resources.
So we do these boxes at home. We call them wonder boxes where the children will create a box of resources that have come from loo rolls or scrap and then we'll show them how they can make art. We get them to have their own wonder box at home so that they save materials too.
And we make kits. So when we do a workshop we beautify the junk that's on the floor into these kits and then we sell them and then that money goes back into producing workshops - it's circular.
Collage artwork
Nothing But Buildings
2025
20x20 collage board and found papers
What's it been like getting involved in the Weymouth Gallery project and working with us?
Working on the gallery piece, I was investigating collage as an object or collage as a conversation. so the gallery it was really lovely to think about it leaping up off paper into something that would ask questions, made people talk about these shapes. Also working with young people on how we use the local environment and the buildings was such a nice piece of work to do because kids are brilliant at it, and they got that from our environment where we live.
They reimagined the buildings [of Weymouth] into shapes and then that informed the building’s tiles that they made; lifting art into something that's an object or something that will hopefully inspire other young people.
