Week 2

Home

What is home?

Is home a house or is it only a representation of the home?

Home isn’t only the four walls that we live in, home is how we fill this space with love, emotions, connection, people, ideas.

The difference between a home and a house

Home definition

the house, apartment, etc. where you live, especially with your family:

someone’s or something’s place of origin, or the place where a person feels they belong:

House definition

a building for human habitation, especially one that consists of a ground floor and one or more upper storeys

I feel like this definition are very useful because there is a huge difference for me between a house and a home. Home is something more than only a building. A home is a place that you create for yourself or is created by others, a place that doesn’t especially mean a building, it’s a place that can’t be fully described and understood, it’s more of a feeling of belonging, comfort and peace.

But at the same time, it doesn’t mean that a house isn’t home. It is. If you create it into a home.

Thoughts on lecture 1

I really enjoyed the work that was presented in this lecture.

Every piece had something unique in it.

It just got me wondering what really home is?

I feel like this is such a huge topic that I can’t put a description into it.

Everything that makes you feel familiar is a home. Everything that makes you feel comfortable, things that mean something to you. It can be a house, objects, people, emotions, feelings, your body, your mind.

That’s why it is hard to find a definition because the definition depends on your point of view.

WHAT DOES HOME MEAN TO YOU?

Artistic research from the lecture 1

Francesca Woodman was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring either herself or female models.

Many of her photographs show women, naked or clothed, blurred (due to movement and long exposure times), merging with their surroundings, or whose faces are obscured. On 19th January 1981, Francesca Woodman tragically threw herself from the window of her loft in the East Village. She was twenty-two.

Woodman brought an understanding of Symbolism, the Baroque, Surrealism and Futurism to her haunting, sensual, and occasionally, violent self-portraits.

Interested in how people relate to space, and how the three-dimensional world could be reconciled with the two dimensions of the photograph, Francesca Woodman played complex games of hide-and-seek with her camera. She depicts herself fading into a flat plane, becoming the wall under the wallpaper, part of the floor, or sealed behind glass, constantly contrasting the fragility and vulnerability of her own body with the strength of the objects around her.

Her body becomes an expressive tool that mingles with the other objects she chooses to photograph; gloves, eels, sheets, mirrors, fireplaces and flowers. Fascinated by limits and boundaries, Woodman’s work conjures the precarious moment between adolescence and adulthood; between existence and the ultimate disappearance, death.

Lindsay Seers (born 1966) is a British artist living and working in London

She made hundreds of images using her own body as a camera, where her mouth cavity is the camera body and her lips the shutter and the aperture.

Whilst in Paraguay the artist documented the room in which she was staying and made a series of photos titled “The Lost Room”, recording details which she believed would certainly be erased by time from her memory – quotidian things such as how a table leg met the floor or the profile of a skirting board. Seers recorded images of the room and the vicinity of the house in her mouth, in a ritualised daily practice: preparing a paper in the darkened wardrobe and then inserting the paper in her mouth whilst wearing a black sack, so that the images were captured in her body, in a process that meant she was physically conjoined to the moment of capture in an intense way. The distant click of the sealed black box of the camera could not fully connect her to the act of photographing in the way this ritualised practise could.

Lying down, often on the floor, she tried to retain the image through muscle memory as well as in her mind. The work is both melancholic and ecstatic as to the presence of matter in time and the extraordinariness of ordinary things. The work draws attention to one’s own physical presence as matter (another object in the world) and the impact consciousness (memory) has on being present in the world.

Somewhere between the objective view and the subjective view we grope for significance for the act of photographing and what it lacks.