M and I just moved, to a tiny little house with a barn-looking shack in the yard that I have converted to a studio (see past few entries for photos). Now that this is done, I feel full of pent-up potential, and I hope I can actually make something happen in there...
Until then, I have been indulging my nesting urges by reading lots of “shelter blogs” and meditating on our possessions and new space. During grad school, I was very invested in ideas about homemaking, interior design, and other domestic arts. Not only did these ideas inform my art practice, but they also were important to me personally, shaping my outlook on life and method of making my way in the world. I read a lot of scholarly and not-so-scholarly books and articles about this topic, everything from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, to Witold Rybczynski’s Home to design books put out byMartha Stewart, Sunset, and Better Homes and Gardens.
But lately, maybe since I moved out here to LA, I have lost touch with that facet of my inspiration. Even though I very carefully thought out the arrangement of our old apartment and placement of things within it, I never felt truly at home there. I cooked and wiped and vacuumed and watered, but I did not felt invested in that nest. And at the same time, those ideas seemed to fade out of my work, in favor of using art as way to investigate and record this new landscape I was experiencing.
So now that I am re-investigating home-making, I wonder what effect this will have on my art, especially since my studio will be next to our house. Will I become reinvigorated with these ideas or remain in this floating landscape world I have working in for the past few months?
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