Thoughts on Home, from Home.
I am writing this post as I am going into my third week of quarantine due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which is sweeping the planet. It feels like a very appropriate time to sit down and share some thoughts and meditations on home.. from home. I have an on going body of work where I explore the concept of home and domestic spaces from a feminist point of view. Additionally, my point of view has been developed from my peripatetic childhood, as I spent my formative years nomadically moving with my family between Canada, Australia, and the US. Typically we would dwell in a place for no longer than one year, and often far less.
In 2018 I became a naturalized citizen of the United States, after living in this country for eighteen years under the status of "legal alien." This shift in the legality of my permission to dwell here, permanently and as a bonafide citizen with full rights, led me to ask the questions: "Is the United States now my home?" "What is home?" "What makes a home, a home?"
I suppose these questions stump me as they illuminate my complicated relationship with the concept of home - a complication which many share for various reasons, and some a lot more hostile than mine own. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says "the house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams." But what if you don't have a childhood house in the way he's referring to? How do you dream of that ephemeral place if you've never experienced it? How does one feel settled in space?
Like the bulk of our psychology, it is in childhood that our initial experiences with the elusive concept of “home” are formed. Stable for some, volatile for others, home is an illusory state of mind which we may constantly yearn to return to; however, this usually means returning to an idealized place that no longer exists in reality, and only remains intact in our memories or imaginations.
In order to seek further answers to these questions, I have turned to books and essays which flesh out these concepts either spatially, poetically, politically, or architecturally.
Here are a few of the various answers I have found thus far, which directly or indirectly begin to answer these questions:
Home is...
"...a nested system of enclosed spaces."
- Mark Wigley, Untitled, Sexuality and Space
"...the will to remain rooted to familiar ground and the certainty of knowing one's place."
- bell hooks, Belonging
"...safe, familiar, friendly."
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, chapter 22
"...a box in the world theatre."
- Beatriz Colomina referencing Walter Benjamin, Sexuality and Space
"[Something that] constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability."
- Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space
In 2018 I became a naturalized citizen of the United States, after living in this country for eighteen years under the status of "legal alien." This shift in the legality of my permission to dwell here, permanently and as a bonafide citizen with full rights, led me to ask the questions: "Is the United States now my home?" "What is home?" "What makes a home, a home?"
I suppose these questions stump me as they illuminate my complicated relationship with the concept of home - a complication which many share for various reasons, and some a lot more hostile than mine own. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says "the house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams." But what if you don't have a childhood house in the way he's referring to? How do you dream of that ephemeral place if you've never experienced it? How does one feel settled in space?
Like the bulk of our psychology, it is in childhood that our initial experiences with the elusive concept of “home” are formed. Stable for some, volatile for others, home is an illusory state of mind which we may constantly yearn to return to; however, this usually means returning to an idealized place that no longer exists in reality, and only remains intact in our memories or imaginations.
In order to seek further answers to these questions, I have turned to books and essays which flesh out these concepts either spatially, poetically, politically, or architecturally.
Here are a few of the various answers I have found thus far, which directly or indirectly begin to answer these questions:
Home is...
"...a nested system of enclosed spaces."
- Mark Wigley, Untitled, Sexuality and Space
"...the will to remain rooted to familiar ground and the certainty of knowing one's place."
- bell hooks, Belonging
"...safe, familiar, friendly."
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, chapter 22
"...a box in the world theatre."
- Beatriz Colomina referencing Walter Benjamin, Sexuality and Space
"[Something that] constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability."
- Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space
Inspiring words on the most important topic of our time. What is home, and how do we remember it----nurture it and protect it? Emily is an artist to follow. Her work is an invitation to a dialogue. Valerie Andrews, Editor of Reinventing Home. www.reinventinghome.org
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