Insight

I Can Only Stay Away for So Long

I've been working on my artist statement for "I Live Here Now" for weeks and just added it to my website the other day. I'm considering it a work-in-progress because it feels not quite there yet. I do want something I've written about the work to be out in the world, though, and I think finding the thing that it's missing will come with time. I may need to let it all settle in more and I'll make adjustments as they come.

Wayfinder, detail

I’ve been without a home by circumstance and by choice for several years. In 2012, I began traveling in the United States. and abroad for my work, rarely spending extended periods of time in any one location. This new lifestyle made me realize I don’t know where I want to live, and I find myself searching for this seemingly elusive place today. While I am content to be without a home, I long for that one place where I feel most myself, a place where I want to stay. In an effort to find what I’m looking for, I was compelled to define and redefine home through research, writing and object making, as well as examining my past, my present and my future.

Over the past year, I have explored ideas of home in three distinctive places. Arriving in Iceland for the first time, I felt attune with myself and with my surroundings in a way I had never felt before. The pieces I made in a two-month residency there illustrate feelings of belonging and of being found. In my childhood home in New York, I reflected on my relationships with my family as well as relationships with the other places I’ve lived in the United States. The foundation of my artistic sources and countless other details were revealed as I considered individual people and places. Further, through all the places I have traveled, I have become keenly aware of my ability to find home in the unknown. In all of these places, Iceland, the United States and countries abroad, I examined memories and focused on things that carry emotional weight. I also relied on the language of jewelry, looking to a variety of historical forms for guidance.

“I Live Here Now” represents what home means to me as well as the memories and emotions associated with the different places that are a part of my collective home. Jewelry, objects, text, photographs, ritual, arrangements and installation serve to demonstrate my ideas and to establish a unique narrative. Ultimately, I know my home is the place where I am truly myself, and, essentially, I know now that I do not need a physical location to call home; my home is me and it is wherever I am.

Island of 14,264 Days, detail

Thanks for reading.