A Love Letter to Home

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.