Homemaker: home (2018)

11 2x4 pieces of Spruce wood, 45 2 ½” wood screws, 23 58” yards of red chiffon, 130 yards of
blue embroidery thread, 18 months of my own collected hair and offerings from friends
7’3” x 7’3” x 8’

Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem Oregon

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Building a house is a project that takes committed work to design, plan, build, and decorate. Construction requires completing tedious, repetitive tasks to complete something to be proud of. Frequently the recognition of this work is forgotten, to praise the finished product. After building the house comes maintaining the home. Domestic life involves menial tasks that are only noticed if they have not been completed. This maintenance is physically and emotionally strenuous, but necessary to create a foundation for stability, comfort, and safety. Building and maintaining a home manifests in the nurture and care of the people around us. Emotional bonds are ever-evolving and require maintenance and small gestures to grow in various ways. We are always making impacts on each other, whether or not we intend to. Relationships can be built with constant care and attention, or left unmaintained.

In this piece, I am building a human house, a home, a material metaphor that is, and always will be, under construction. It can be destroyed but it will always have existed. It’s framed by wooden bones that support its structure. Its walls are skin and blood made of fabric that responds to pressure and moves when someone passes by, but stays in one piece bound by tightly-knit fibers. The sheer fabric allows an obstructed view inside or outside, but creates an enclosed space. The strings are veins or hair, thin and unnoticeable as single strands, but accumulate to a pervasive blue. You are a guest! Just visiting, renting out a room, or paying down a mortgage, you are and always will have been a part of its life.

 

THINGS TO DO IN THE HOUSE:

walk through it

stand in the doorway and feel large

sit in the middle and feel small

fit in as many people as possible at once

tangle and untangle the string veins

let them follow you out

walk fast and watch the wall skin wave

hide in it

hide from it

look at it from the outside, inside, upside down, all sides

leave a piece of your hair somewhere