I rolled blue water based printing ink over the back of one of my Gran’s gold doilys (see previous post) and took a print from it.
A black and white drawing from this print has become one of the nesting dolls representing home.
My mother’s response to, ‘what does home mean to you?’, (one of the four questions posed in the exhibition) was that it could be the high moors, a cave, a nook in the hills, or somewhere remote and self-sufficient. Home is an atmosphere. My mother and father met whilst they were camping under the Cuillin hills. A simple black line forming the Cuillin ridge has become ‘home’ on another of the dolls.
I painted all the matryoshka dolls’ interiors a deep grey, like a nook in a rock, to reflect my mother’s response to ‘home’.
Over the last few years, I have come to realise that home is rooted somewhere inside myself and is more about being comfortable in my own skin than related to a geographic place. In the last fifteen years, I have moved house seven times. In one of those moves I discovered this quote:
‘…the state we think of as home is not a place, or a set of given facts, but consists in that very tension between going and staying, between belonging and being lost, between here and there.’
John Burnside, Homage to Kare Kivijarvi, Inspiration behind the poem, Scottish Arts Council 2004.
Burnside has, for me, captured the essence of home.
In April and May of this year I filmed the last six minutes of the train journey back to the village where I grew up and the last six minutes of the flight home to where I now live. I’ve amalgamated these two moving images together with Burnside’s text to form a short film. This, I plan to project onto a table setting for the exhibition with the printed plates my mother and I designed.