The significance of a home lies within the memories of the space. My childhood home holds meaning for me not only because it is where I grew up, but because it was also my mother’s childhood home. Six generations of our family have passed through the house, creating a long history of associated stories, memories, and emotions. Homes develop their identity through years of their inhabitant’s care, neglect, and change, allowing for a wide range of feelings to remain in the space. Through sculptures and drawings of both the interior and exterior of the home I grew up in, I reflect on the dichotomy between longing and anxiety that can be felt toward one place, and how the spaces we inhabit hold memory.
Reimagined House, is a dissected and modular representation of my childhood home. I constructed ten scaled down sculptures of rooms for memories to live in. The spaces are left empty, allowing the viewer to look in through windows and doorways, and imagine what happened there and feel the energy of each room. When stacked together there are areas of the rooms that you cannot fully see, creating a fragmented feeling. Memories are not whole; our mind remembers the most important parts and then our brain fills in the rest using context.
With the elongated attic, Together/Apart, I am taking a part of the Reimagined House and stretching it, transforming the space inside. The attic is an important place in this house for me because it was where my bedroom was located. I long for this space because it was my sanctuary when I would feel anxious in other parts of the house. The attic’s length establishes a physical distance between the two viewers looking in, but it also creates an intimacy because of the shared space inside. I hope to allow the viewer to feel a sense of play and curiosity while also contemplating the underlying meanings of the work.
The colors of my sculptures are chosen intuitively. I am drawn toward warm, vivid colors and how they are reminiscent of toys and crafts supplies from my childhood, such as Polly Pocket dolls and Crayola crayons. Although some sculptures like Us, You, and Her, include blue, a representation of a sadness, I wanted the Reimagined House to glow in bright, dreamy colors. These saturated pastels contrast with the more expected and normal colors of the inside of the home and with the melancholier ideas in the work. This helps continue the idea that there is a range of feelings that exist in these spaces. I am especially connected to pink, which was the color of both the carpet and walls in my attic bedroom, resulting in an attachment to the color. It is comforting, soft, and intimate, while also being playful and girly, and unapologetic in its sweetness. Some sculptures are left white, such as one of the skeleton houses, What is Left, the house within a screen house, In or Out, and the stacking houses, Nesting. I choose not to add color to these sculptures, allowing a blank slate for the viewer to interpret the shapes and forms without any additional information that color would provide.
The materials that I choose to use, such as cardboard and paper mache, are often thought of as low craft. This relates to the feelings of sentimentality, longing, melancholy, and homesickness that I am addressing, and how those emotions are often looked down upon, or not taken seriously, in art history and as emotions in general. The cardboard becomes warped when I apply the wet paper mache clay, resulting in outcomes that are out of my control, helping me highlight the imperfections of remembering and forgetting.
With my drawings, I depict figures in different spaces in and around the house. They provide quiet, intimate moments to pause and help to activate the spaces that you see in the sculptures. Many memories that I have of this house are based on stories that have been told to me by my mother or other family members, creating an array of real and unreal memories. Drawing allows me to communicate very specific moments or memories whether they are real or imaginary, such as standing in the backyard or sitting on the roof with a mourning dove. The body language of the figures and value in the graphite help express the emotions I am trying to communicate.
Reflecting on this house, and creating many iterations of it, helps me examine and process the emotions surrounding the memories it holds. Through these sculptures and drawings, I aim to elicit the wide range of feelings that can be felt toward one place, and how even after we are gone, the energy of what has happened there can still be felt.
Bibliography
Quiroga, Rodrigo Quian. The Forgetting Machine. Dallas TX: BenBella Books, Inc.,
2017.
Solomon, Robert C. In Defense of Sentimentality. New York: Oxford University Press,
2004.