Home Studies - house and home

As I began the process of preparing our Minneapolis home for the real estate market, I started noticing marks I had overlooked during years of day-to-day living: a handprint on the wall behind my bed, the centers of the stair treads abraded by foot traffic, the decals stuck on my daughter’s bedroom window, the veneer worn off around the kitchen cabinets’ door handles. I looked for and and photographed the subtle, telltale physical signs of my family’s presence that had been etched into our home over time. Each of these marks traced family history that would be expunged in the process of preparing our home for sale. Soon a new family would inscribe their own marks on my former dwelling. Photographing these marks helped me consider the physicality—and the transience—of the spaces and places we call home.

After moving to Calgary, I discovered an ongoing process of urban renewal that had been dramatically changing the complexion of the city’s established neighbourhoods over years’ time. Observing houses being torn down prompted me to think about the ephemerality and fragility of the physical structures in which we make our homes. I marveled at how quickly a house can be torn apart. I responded by making a series of photographs of demolitions, looking at what is revealed in their aftermath, and reflecting upon home as a physical, and as an emotional, place. These images consider aspects of home that endure and those that vanish, left to reside only in memory. They contemplate the complex relationship between notions of house and home. The images allude to important connections between the shapes of family life and our physical surround—the stage on which our daily lives play out.