L.
The Home In Heart & The Home In Hand.
A home is supposed to be a totem of safety, a sanctuary where care is a given and the world stays outside. But for some of us whose childhoods passed in homes that were loud and angry, it is a place we approach with caution. If home is meant to be our shelter, where do you go when it is the home you need sheltering from?
Adulthood, in my experience and observation so far, is the archaeology of the childhood self. To rediscover the child we were before social conditioning took hold. But, for the children who had to grow up too soon, there is no "pure" childhood to return to. In this work, I interrogate domesticity as an imagined and cultivated environment, not a memory to be recovered, but a sanctuary that must be built from scratch. Because the need to feel "at home" is indispensable for survival, if you are not given it by circumstance, you must create the illusion of it
This body of work uses physical properties of each medium as a metaphor for the psychological act of cultivating domesticity where it was previously absent.
Pieces like I Started Drawing When I Was 6 and HomeLites navigate the immense turmoil of never truly feeling safe and yet repeatedly attempting to construct the puzzle of a happy domestic life with the wrong pieces.
Family Secrets exposes the reality of familial trauma that often hides behind a translucent door, like the gelatin paper used to maintain the illusion of normalcy. Our Apartment signifies a shift in autonomy. By physically constructing a miniature environment, I am no longer trying to remember a home, but cultivating a safer one from scratch.
The fragile organic life encased in a hard resin shell in HOM/PE signifies the manifestation of a space protected from this history of trauma. My motivation is to take these unexplainable experiences and offer them as a quiet communal comfort for anyone else who has ever had to build their own walls of safety
