This work is intended as a cathartic experience, an incantation to ease me through the troubling transition of leaving a place I called home for twelve years, the Bay Area. Conducting informal interviews with friends in Portland, Oregon –my new home– I record my interaction with the interviewees, asking them to give me their unedited and emotional impressions of the places they call home. I encourage the participants to elaborate on specific details of what makes their home a home: the layout, what they fill it with or how they decorate it, who lives there with them, the outside in contrast to the inside, the shape of the house or yard, the neighborhood, the general environment of Portland or geography of the Pacific Northwest, or perhaps even a reflection of somewhere they no longer inhabit but still consider home. First using a camera to transform the interviews into visual information, I then paint corresponding mental maps for each impression gathered. While illuminating the complexity of the individual’s concept of home, I hope to both absorb and actuate my own sense of home in my new surroundings.
Places We Call Home, 2009
