Familjära Former
If you’ve lived in a house long enough, you get to know it. All the sounds it makes, like when the wind is strong and the house creaks. The sounds become familiar and almost comforting to hear. The most mundane things become precious in a way that others might find hard to understand. Memories of the place accumulate and get stuck there. Memories that fade when you leave but come back to life when you return. It sits in the walls.
This project began as an attempt to preserve a childhood home and evolved into a preservation of those who lived there. The work is a portrait of my family, one year before I was born, posed in front of the house’s old front door. Blinking and grimacing, they stand in front of the house that will become their home. The people in the image are sculpted in clay and cast in plaster. The empty space where the clay once was has left an imprint in the shape of my family. The work speaks of traces of something warm and familiar, that can no longer be reached. Traces of a childhood.