Home is WHERE....?

My initial plan was to create three pieces for this body of work, representing the three family homes I have had; NZ where I grew up, England where my own family started & Australia where it has continued! The idea of using touristy teatowels as the background to my 'landscapes' seemed to flow quite naturally once the concept started blossoming in my mind.  It also appealed to my sense of humour!!!!  However....I didnt realise how difficult it would be to get hold of them!

  It was easy enough here in Adelaide...

 ... & my mother eventually found a couple of options in NZ, but my friends in the UK.....couldnt really find the tacky touristy type I was after!  Not so many people are washing dishes these days....and when they do buy teatowels on their travels, they now seem to choose nice designer ones!  I did buy a designer teatowel from the UK online....having noticed that on ebay the 'tacky' type were being flogged as 'vintage' & were ridiculous prices! However....with further thought, I decided against using the designer one for 2 reasons;
1) An artist had produced it & I could have a copyright issue on my hands!
2) The style really didnt go with the others!

At the same time that I was sourcing my background fabric....I was doing something a little bit unusual.  I was photographing my dishes!  One of my cameras has this really cool 'drawing' option & I found that particularly useful in capturing the shapes of my 'landscape'.

I  enjoyed the variation in shapes, height & texture.  Writing & pattern seemed to be more obvious in the black & white restriction of these 'drawings'.

  Because the teatowels were so bright & colourful, I chose to have my dishes predominantly white, with a few different textures & fabric types, with just one or two features picked out in colour.

 Wanting to have some link between the landscape & the background, I printed the photos of the teatowels onto fabric, & incorporated that as a fabric layer. In the photo above, you get a glimpse of the photo transfer in the mug behind the teacup!

Because that writing had been so significant to me in the studying of the photos, I chose to include writing somewhere on the dishes also.  I then took this further & started altering the teatowel background, by stitching in comments, memories and altering some of the images, including painting some of them a different colour. 

  Whilst creating these pieces, I was also thinking about what 'home' means & how it not only signifies the physical space we live in, but also the location.  At the time I was reading Eleanor Catton's masterpiece "The Luminaries" & she phrased it so beautifully when one of her characters said

"...if home cant be where you come from, then home is what you make of where you go."

I couldnt have worded it better myself!  And then Bruce Chatwin in "Songlines" made it even more personal by saying:

"One commonly held delusion is that men are the wanderers & women are the guardians of the hearth & home. This can, of course, be so.  But women, above all, are the guardians of continuity; if the hearth moves, they move with it."

 

Exhibited with the work 'The Rolling Plains Of Home #1 & 2', are my own penned lines;

                            Home

                                  is the nest

                             I choose to make

                                wherever I am

                             To lay my head

                                   to read a book

                                   to pour my tea

                              Whether for a day

                                              or a lifetime!