Rebecca Glover, 27, is an artist who grew up in Ealing and studied at Edinburgh College of Art. She has had her work exhibited in a number of shows in London, but ‘Void’ is her first solo exhibition. Held at Pitzhanger Manor until May 8, ‘Void’ features an installation and a number of related paintings. For more information visit www.rebeccaglover.co.uk.

What does it feel like to have your debut solo show in Ealing, where you grew up?

It’s amazing to have an exhibition on in Ealing and it’s great that there’s this space for young artists in this beautiful building. My exhibition proposal was accepted in October and since then I’ve been developing this new body of work. It’s great to be here, one of my first jobs was just across the road.

I’ve had really good feedback from the show, but getting people to come here has been quite tricky. Everyone thinks Ealing’s really far away. It’s been difficult to get people to know about it in Ealing as well. You need to do a lot of local publicity and I didn’t have the time to do that.

What is special about having the show at Pitzhanger Manor in particular?

I think it’s a really beautiful space, and there aren’t so many spaces like this available for young artists. It’s unique really. My installation work is site specific and the space available here helped to inspire the form of the installation.

There’s something eerie about John Soane’s [who designed Pitzhanger Manor] architecture here. If you go to his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, now the Soane Museum, every surface inside is covered with pillars, pictures and statues, he had a huge collection of artworks. Some of the collection was originally housed here, but it was taken to the Soane Museum, and now that it’s empty,Pitzhanger has this eerie and strange feeling to it. It’s also full of mirrors and doors, some of which don’t go anywhere, It is suggestive of the ‘other space’, something hidden and unknown.

I don’t think that many people in Ealing know about this place, which is a real shame because it’s really incredible.

What do you think about projects like Open Ealing which are attempting to get people in Ealing involved in art?

I think it sounds like a really good idea, as there often hasn’t been a lot on in Ealing. I think one of the problems is that there are a lot of people who go into the city to get their culture.

There seems to be a lot of interest in the community workshops, but I don’t think there are a so many people interested in contemporary art, and the people who are interested tend to go into the city.

What is your exhibition about?

The ideas around the exhibition started when I was living in South Africa. I was there for six months and I went to visit the District 6 Museum. District 6 was an area of Cape Town which had 60,000 people removed from it during the Apartheid era, and all of their houses were bulldozed. The museum has notes and mementos from the former residents. All these people from the district knew how it felt to have their homes destroyed. They were left questioning where home is, whether it is something emotional or physical.

I started thinking about what it is that people cling to, where it is they find their sense of security, and how that affects their sense of self. That was a few years ago and since then I’ve been thinking about these ideas, especially in the context of natural disasters and, in particular, the Gulf oil spill.

It explores the idea of things not being as stable or permanent as you think, and how that affects our sense of security. The images and reports of the oil spill and the recent series of earthquakes were quite disturbing, but there’s also the beauty of the power of nature. These events are so destructive, but you just can’t do anything about it.

Things can be destroyed in a second, but we try not to think about it.

I did a previous installation on a council estate(The Market Estate Project) which was due to be demolished and that was in part a response to the earthquake in Haiti, but also I felt that the people who had lived on the estate were also going through something similar. They were losing their homes and seeing them destroyed.

I think that these kinds of events make you question your relation to the environment (both local and global) how much our lives depend on oil.

How do you think people have responded to your work? Have you got the response you hoped for?

Yes, I think people have responded well. It certainly affects your sense of stability and security. People really enjoy interacting with the installation; they are intrigued but also unnerved. I’ve had people running off the floor to safety because they were worried the installation was going to break underneath them!

The paintings are a slower experience; they’re more reflective and quiet. I’ve been told that they are ‘very deep’ and thought provoking but haven’t managed to question that response further yet.

I found it fascinating to hear all the different opinions about my work, often people told me things that I had not realised I had been thinking about. When you’re working on a piece you don’t really want to talk about it, you’re not always aware of what you’re thinking about. Then when you do talk to people, you hear things that had been in the back of your mind. Everyone has different opinions, but art is a like that – you can’t control it and what it evokes in people.

What, for you, is the purpose of art?

Everyone has a different justification for doing art, but, for me, it speaks about things you cannot put into words, it’s very emotion-based. It is a form of language that can communicate to people what you feel or think about. Some of my favourite works of art have either lifted me or made me cry. Art can transform your state and can bring you to question things. I’m most interested in the questions art evokes in me.