THE NEED TO CALL A SPACE 'HOME'

It all came to me watching things around my house when the other occupants were not there. I live in a one-story eight bedroom house, with five bedrooms downstairs each with their own niches of common use - kitchen, bathroom, what have you. Mostly abandoned throughout the day, these corners are hide traces of human cohabitation and attachement. The people never really leave the space. The warmth still exists. You see, we are so attached to spaces and making them our own, they are sometimes not understandable. It was important to photograph, even in some cases stage, scenes in a place where I do not have consistent interactions. 

When I know the rough outlines of the said space in the back of mind it is always nice to meditate and then try and capture the scene in its most dignified state. I love that. See? These spaces we're in are all so beautiful I think it is hard to not include ourselves in them. So we leave little hints. Little love letters unassumingly tucked right in plain sight. I took these photos by sometimes standing on chairs and other times crouching in, just to capture the most suitable compositions for this body of work. Also, colours which also contribute to the composition in fact are composition even. 

But yeah, I was tempted to seek out, or seek 'in', those parts of the house that I was familiar with because there was some beautiful stuff there too, however, I had to feel like a foreigner or almost relatively to be able to understand how that space fails and feels and fills perhaps that would be another meditation in itself to come back to. Spaces that are familiar to me and are off every day importance to sort of manifest differently when they are investigated... those are cases where I do I think "I want to put that in" and "I do want to, like. make people understand what the difference is cause I feel it". I think that's a worthwhile instinct to explore. 

Yeah, my mission is to take these photographs, edit them, render them to the best put them as a part of the photo collection, and then later try to emulate them on canvas as a different size cause then that would like help sort of propel what is the like sometimes, you know, like a BIG SPACE and feels SOOO big when it’s a smaller canvas and vice versa. 

These ones, I kind of just was trying new things again and again and it was just like an entirely different world almost within a span of a few meters, so I’m trying to keep consistent settings to help me distance myself and keeping bias out. I think a part of me is also trying to mathematically understand compositions, like, really evaluate and statistically place objects. In that rule, I also see that a very interesting story comes out from that space, like something that I didn’t expect it to give me before. It’s sudden, it is like coincidence, or just like whatever you wanna call it but it’s like I instantly see it. 

Spaces occupy a paradoxical exemption in memory. An atypical example of such a normalization is my cat, who is also seen in a couple of these images. She will be bored and uninspired indoors, often secluding herself or anxiously latching on to me as she finds an excuse to nap. When placed in new unfamiliar places, she's curious, mobile, anxious. The more we inhabit a space, the more self-conscious it makes us sometimes about we experience the world 'outside'. The opposite happens when spaces are new...we feel restless and inspired. Also, imagination is an evolutionary function for humans. We prefer spaces that spark imagination. Familiar spaces can, in those objectives, be a culprit for 'sealing in' imagination. We can see by the means of these photos that objects and surroundings are often at odds with each other, and the spectrum of temporarity highlighting the overlapping conflict between 'newer' and 'older' items within the same space.

A working thesis in contribution to film, photography, paintings, commerce, architecture, general sense. 'THE NEED TO CALL SPACE 'HOME' is a cross media exploration of a psychological bridge connecting spaces with human attachment.