“Finding Home”

 

“The old saying “we bring our lares with us “ has many variations”. Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space.

 

Topoanalysis is “the psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives”(Bachelard). This work is a personal journey to revisit the intimate spaces of my past. Space invokes memory, and this return to these intimate sites asks the question, “what was home?” My memories and experience of these spaces are fractured. Returning allows those memories to surface so a Topoanalysis can begin, and that personal confrontation is fixed by and comes to bear in the photograph. If the phrase “we bring our lares with us” has any truth, then the photographic image is the synthesis of our lived experience.

 

If someone lived in eleven houses throughout childhood, how would they relate to an idea of home when their experience of it feels fractured and displaced? Gaston Bachelard argues that Space fixes memory, and that memories are sounder the more securely they are fixed by certain kinds of Space. If the photograph is memory, then Topoanalysis through photography offers a return to the spaces which memory inhabits and the fixing of those memories in the photograph. These photographs are evidence of my confrontation with these personal spaces, a topographic record of traces of a past long interiorised. This act of seeing and remembering is imbued with a strangeness and fear brought on by returning to these familiar spaces, and an attempt to lay these feelings and the past to rest.