Finding Your Way Home

A daily artwork I made about hearth and home from June 2015.

Today I’m thinking of home, not feeling homesick, but what we attribute to our thoughts regarding home. The need for shelter and safety, a place we can relax in and feel ourselves untangle and unravel, or curl up to read a good book.

This idea of writing about the journey to find your way home, came to me when I was reading an artist statement from one of my Dare to Create course graduates who has just had an exhibition.

She linked her artistic journey to connecting with home and a longing for things that can never be. It was a powerful statement which described her techniques, but more importantly, the reason why she created this particular series of artworks.

Finding your way home as an artist is about that connection we have to our own stories, that of identity, where we come from and what we stand for.

My first serious foray into oil painting was a series about home. Doors and windows, rafters and roofs. Within those paintings was all the ache I felt for leaving the home we built for ourselves in Victoria’s high country.

This home took 12 years to build, step by slow step as we sourced and financed components for each stage of the building process. The house slab was gifted to us by my parents. It sat like a concrete tennis court for the kids to play on for years. We called it “seasoning” the concrete.

Then came the posts, sourced from a defunct local timber mill and our own trees cut and spliced as rafters. Meanwhile the mud bricks we made were disintegrating back into the soil. Many times I despaired that this house would ever get built.

When it finally had walls and windows to keep out the weather, we were able to move in, room by room, while we waited for the plumbing to be installed.

I’m thinking of home and what it means as I come down to Victoria to visit our son and his family. The gas fire is warming the lounge-room and I am perched on his couch writing on my laptop. On the mantlepieces are family portraits. The walls are adorned with photos from a recent ski trip and children’s drawings.

As I was searching my archives for articles about home, I found a piece I wrote to be included in an artist’s book about the notion of home and what it means to people.

Here is what I wrote in 2019:

“Home is a bag, a backpack, a book, a man, a family, a dog or two. It’s birdsong and a billy or thermos, a pillow and enough money to keep travelling, and when you stop it’s a bed and a good night’s sleep..”

I was writing about our journey to find the “perfect place” to put down roots and call home

“…homes we built in the bush, first a shack then a cottage and then a mudbrick house. Solid as the stone and earth and timber with which it was built and I thought I’d never leave...

I carry the remembrance of that artistic home in my heart. So I guess that while home can be a place, that place can be anywhere really, where my heart is happy, where there is a bit of garden, the sound of birds singing and my family.”

A paper pulp painting on an old embroidery - experimenting with materials in 2021