My work deals with memory, history, and belonging. I am interested in the sense of isolation and belonging that is associated with memories of familiar and unfamiliar places. For this project, I explore the meaning of home and belonging through animating a series of drawings from my notebooks. 

 

This work was inspired by Nikolaus Gansterer’s lecture ‘Liquid Identities’. The notion of using drawing as a semantic cluster that relates to diverse meanings, like a map that describes a place, space, or situation. Using multiple mediums, this work constructs a memory space encompassing the non-specific spaces we inhabit which speak to the familiarity and unfamiliarity of rooms that I have inhabited. The universality of interior spaces is a source of familiarity but also temporariness. 

 

Having moved around from an early age and having lived in four cities within the span of one year, I am interested in using drawing to navigate questions around home, belonging, and identity. The visual subject of this work comes from my notebooks. My notebooks traveled with me through these different locations and act as an ongoing record of my reading notes, travel itinerary, drawings, thoughts. These notebook pages also act as a record of my movements from one space to another. 

 

As I revisit these pages, I found recurring symbols such as clocks, rooms, windows, trees. I employ these symbols to connect the pages together. The clock provides an ambiguous measure for the passage of time and the notion of waiting: waiting to go home, waiting to feel a sense of belonging. By animating the drawings, the spaces are connected by their similarity and differences. The lack of specificity of these images creates an in-between space that can relate to any geographical or temporal location that comes to life through the moving images. The subtitles add another layer to the narrative. The somewhat absurd box analogy probes the question of what home and belonging really mean.