Abstract:
A Love Letter to Home celebrates all the quiet moments of everyday life that occur in
the domestic realm. Focusing on a range of intimate interior spaces and moments, this
thesis takes on an auto-ethnographic approach, exploring the traces of inhabitation
that can be used to document home. Documenting the domestic realm—its routines,
idiosyncrasies, and rituals—has allowed me to trace my own inhabitance. Home to me
is not linked to one physical site but rather the collection of feelings and moments that
have been left behind as memories. My practice involves touch—textures layered by
hand and then rubbed away, leaving behind remnants. In this transference, I project
myself into the space and capture this relationship between myself and home. Through
photography, drawing, model making, fabric work, collage, and painting, I have given
everyday life a tongue to speak. The work then looks to correspond with the public,
asking them to consider their own dialogue with home, using my own experience as an
example.
The daily is an unapparent yet unhidden part of existence—a soft murmur that is all
around us. Forgettable as individual actions, yet as a whole, they anchor us, making
up the basis of who we are. To bathe, lounge, and to rest; home can be seen in the
routines, rituals, and creature comforts that every one of us falls into. Home can be
seen as a container for everyday life being lived—housing these daily happenings,
finding equanimity in the isolated moments that are often experienced in silence. In my
interactions with home, the space moves away from being static—home becomes a verb
rather than a noun that resides within four walls.