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' ADAM VE ADAMA - In Honor of Home and Homeland ' Description The project will examine the kind of integrated sense of being we feel within our natural environment. The investigation will be conducted within two interrelated themes - the notion of homeland and the house as home. This is especially important as the perception of 'home' is going through significant changes. In the contemporary world the choice seems to be open - people move from one side of the world to the other and in most places they visit they can encounter people from almost anywhere - everyone is everywhere - a globalised world. On the other hand there are small groups of people, defined by a number of cultural and political characteristics, who are striving for their own piece of land where they can pursue a sense of identity through the entitlement of land as home. When I view the shape, textures, materials, of houses from the outside, I wonder how they fit into and are born from their natural surroundings. What is the relationship between the natural environment and the structural design of our physical home? Exploring the relationship between the house designed by an architect for the purpose of being a home, and the human, personal involvement within its walls, our intimate sacred spaces, is central to my project. What is the place we call home? What choices do we actually make in relation to our physical homes? And how is this interpreted into the way we shape and design the places we live in and, supposedly, dwell? To address these questions materials including earth, natural fibres and sticks will be taken from the natural environment to be tested and explored. These fundamental materials will be manipulated using contemporary methods, and contrasted with culturally refined materials of similar qualities such as porcelain. The integration and relationships of contrasting materials will be explored as metaphor for the concept of home. The investigation will flow through different dimensions of experience, from the wilderness, natural and cultural environments, architectural spaces through to objects for living. The project will relate to a specific site, a built structure, it's textural surfaces (such as walls), lighting and objects telling stories of home, as materials of exploration and artistic interpretation. Significance It seems that very few women have directly addressed the subject of home on a conceptual level. I believe my background and experiences will offer a unique contribution to the discourse. Being a woman, a visual artist and a product of this era, I will approach the search as women have traditionally done in building a home: gathering, collecting and testing with the local materials and moulding with learnt crafts skills. My focus will be on addressing the research questions in a narrative manner. Through referring to and conversing with different disciplines: visual and performing arts and design - architectural theory, landscape art and garden design, sound performance. The process will employ the potential of overlapping fields that will also characterise the outcomes. This interweaving may also introduce a poetic sense to the outcome as a result of exploiting contrasting scales - real life or even larger as the enormity of landscape, crossing to miniature scale as coming close to intimacy and sacredness within home. In his book, The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, states: '…the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past in which its preparation and appearance could be followed ' and further says : 'Because of its novelty and its action the poetic image has an entity and dynamism of its own, therefore the project's significance is as a 'disjunctive poetics' - an engagement with both large and small scale in co-relation to 'home'. Aims The aims of the investigation are to: - create and design a 'place' as an artistic installation. The experience within will raise questions and issues related to our sense of place and belonging - 'home', through different dimensions and scales; - explore within the creation of the 'place' a sense of design which is as if born from its site, the natural environment, and which may encompass a sense of the traditional values joining with contemporary attitudes; - examine the issue of home as viewed from different theoretical backgrounds (philosophical, psychological, social, architectural); and - experiment in shaping and designing structures and investigate new approaches for achieving inspiring textural surfaces through the use of natural materials (raw earth natural fibres etc.) contrasting with refined materials as porcelain. |