Permutations

My studio work largely explores the theme of home—where that is, what it looks like, how it’s changed. This last question is especially relevant as we’ve all been forced to relocate, now working and creating from no place else than our homes. In this transition, I have found myself moving away from mapping my home via cartography, as I have done in previous projects. Instead, I am focusing on creating a portrait of my home as viewed from the inside.

For this new iteration of my project, I have created a series of one-line drawings that detail various corners of my apartment. Each of these pieces is a reflection of some part of my home that has been changed by loss—scenes with something discarded, misplaced, or left behind. At the same time, each scene is comfortingly familiar; this apartment has been the backdrop for and the home to every big change that has happened in my life. There are sections of the pieces where I have cut out the paper around each drawn line. I have found that these cut-outs accentuate the line work of the drawings, but at the same time complicate them; they introduce the possibility of seeing something through the drawing, blending two-dimensional drawn space and three-dimensional physical space. This creation of space through lines and then the removal of space through cuts have provided me with a new perspective on home—do we define home by what is there or by what is not there? Is home nothing more than a collection of spaces?

There is a lot of grappling and processing that comes with thinking about this theme. My goal through each iteration of this project was to take this thought process and ground it in a physical, spatial object—an attempt to capture this nebulous space of thinking about home.