Carolyn Lefley's work is about photographic memory and the domestic environment.   Her work has an intimate mode of address that focuses on the average suburban house and the decorative and spatial effects that make it a 'home'.   In the series 'Home', Lefley revisited her childhood home to document the spaces there.   She wanted to capture a darker, almost unfamiliar side to this house which she grew up in.   The pictures were taken at night and combine the darkened private interior with the warm glow of suburbia outside.   The viewer is left to feel uncomfortable in these cold, empty interiors.  

This project led Lefley onto a more psychological notion of what constitutes a home.   The series 'Belonging' consists of photographs of an abandoned doll's house. One of its most significant effects is to produce a disorientating feeling of things being out of scale.   The compressed space of the doll's house is strangely transformed by Lefley as the photographic enlargement restores to the miniature a human scale.   And yet something is not right.   Dim artificial lighting produces a nocturnal effect and suggests feelings of estrangement.   The bold and over-size wallpaper pattern compound the unsettling experience of this uncanny space.    These pictures evoke memories of childhood and suburban gloom.   These rooms become potential site for the 'unhomely' disruptions that occur in the darkest fairy tales. The series took inspiration from 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears', which Lefley sees as a story about the search for a identity and a place to belong, a home.

From dolls houses to real houses, in her book 'Semi-detached' Lefley explores the humble but iconic architecture of the suburban semi-detached home, with its neat front garden, the bay fronted windows and red tiled roof. The semi-detached house seems to be a symbol of suburbia and all that might represent, including specific class and taste values of the middle classes.   What interested Lefley about growing up in a semi were the odd glimpses caught into the neighbour's property, as it was a mirror image of her own home.   As a child, the uncanny feeling experienced whilst in next door's house remained: it was a mirror image of our her home and the décor was different but it felt strangely familiar.   Like in Freud's essay "The 'Uncanny" "...the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads us back to what is known of old and long familiar."   The images show the architectural symmetry of the two halves, whilst revealing subtle differences in the tastes of the owners of each side.   The inhabitants are absent in these pictures; their identity suggested by the private interiors of their homes.