Playing with notions of home

 As ever, our trip to the cottage has made me stop and consider the notion of home. I have pondered this before, but travelling so far to a place so remote and so different, and yet feeling so at home, at times confounds me.

Home and Place.

I have returned with lots of thoughts and drifting words to try and express this experience; trying to gain some understanding. For the time being they remain a little bit misty, a little bit unformed. Occasionally some sunlight pours through, and I have odd moments of clarity.

So I am listening to each and every moment, no matter how small, and where I can I am using it to help me make sense of it.

As I was unpacking stuff and putting it away, I looked at the rusty pages I had brought back with me.

I enjoyed their wild, intense, yet incomplete marks. From the old hot plate coil.

A series of rusty nails.

A grid of wires from a cray pot.

And some random rusty metal washer marks. 

I turned the two washer/metal mark postcards over and picked up a scalpel. I started by cutting random squares and rectangles from behind - not knowing which parts of the marks would appear on the piece - random, no rulers, just go.

I followed this up by cutting random triangles in the same way.

Playing with notions of home...

They are quirky. They look nothing like where we live in Maleny. They look nothing like the cottage in Scotland, but universally, this form appears to Western minds at least, to signify home.

I love that I know of so many folk working with this form at the moment. All over the world, in paper, in fabric and in 3D. It is something. It is so recognisable. It is understood. And yet, the investigations are all unique. They are all attempting to discover and share some particular aspect of home and our relationship to it.

Where it goes to next is possibly anybody's guess - but the instinctive and intuitive slicing of paper without regard for precision, accuracy or placement was  good to do. That zone of doing without thinking, let my mind wander and drift across the idea of home a lot as I worked.

Using paper prepared with old materials in Scotland, back here, connected my two places. I love how the other rusted papers appear so wild and fierce - like the landscape there can be when the wind howls.