Homes We Carry
My friend Adam Wesselinoff, who work for The Catholic Weekly, recently launched the online journal Quiros Online, which is an online forum bringing together philosophers, theologians, journalists and other professionals to write long-form reflections on art, architecture and artefacts of popular culture, just to name a few.
The latest piece on the journal features an extended reflection by Kamila Soh, whom regular readers would have come across on this blog, ABC Religion Online and on the Centre for Public Christianity.
On Quiros, Soh reflected on the installations by the Korean born artist Do Ho Suh, who tackled the subject of home, identity and belonging in his installations currently being exhibited in Sydney. Her reflections are beautiful for her sympathy with what Suh was trying to convey, whilst also bringing her architectural background to bear in sharply critiquing Suh’s execution of the installations. Instead of home, Suh’s work seemed to emphasise (maybe deliberately) transit. Homes are not so much permanent places as they are feelings we carry as we constantly embark on journeys from one location to another.
Key to the whole article is Soh’s observation that, instead of trying to erect monuments - lasting statements of a society’s aspirations or identity - Suh’s homage to identity appeared to be an “Anti-Monument”, which actively works against any notion of permanence, even dissolving the materiality of the monument itself, manifested in the move away from stone and wood installations to buildings made of paper or sheer fabric. This is most strikingly encapsulated in this excerpt of Soh’s essay:
His (the artist’s) first ever translucent fabric home project, Seoul Home/L.A. Home/N. Y. Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home, 1999, is a meticulously detailed, life-scale model of his childhood home in Korea. One can clearly see the outline of a house, with its latticed woodwork, windows and door frames stitched onto voluminous sheets of green silk. But as one moves closer, they realise that is all there is to the house, with no internal walls and no floors, so that one can see right through to the rafters of its silken roof. It is an empty husk; a mere shell of a house suspended from the ceiling. For a project that seemed so personal, it is decidedly abstracted and dematerialised—an embodiment of displacement itself.
I found this a highly perceptive essay that would help me think through an essay on the theme of home which I hope to develop over the course of the next year. Watch this space.
In the meantime, however, I highly recommend that you subscribe to Quiros Online (I for one am a subscriber), and Soh’s essay is well worth a read in full here.
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