Week 6

This week I did a lot of thinking and planning about how everything I have been exploring will come together. I decided that I want each piece I ultimately do to be a series of sort of landscape of places or memories that I associate with an aspect of my own personal home. Each of these places will be based on how a word that will be the title of that individual piece relates to this personal experience. The words I have thought about including are:

            -Family

            -Loss

            -Separation

            -Loneliness

            -Hope

            -Future

            -Traffic

            -Rebuild/Rebirth

            -Struggle

            -Play

            -Laugh

            -Cry

            -Displacement

            -Belonging

I think it is very interesting how just one word can change ones perception on how a work is perceived by a viewer. Especially since I do want the landscapes or places to be abstracted to some degree, the title will give the viewer a direction to go in when thinking about the pieces, but since they are wide-open words it still allows them to make connections on their own. I still have a bit of fine tuning and planning on how the image and the word will relate but I think it is a step forward.

I have been journaling a lot this week to help figure out how to answer these questions. I read Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans this week, which is book of essay collection from both before and after Hurricane Katrina on the power of place, loss, culture, etc. It was very interesting and sad too, but it definitely gave me a lot to think about in where I fit into New Orleans.

Today I am going “home” to my parents house in Texas. Not only am I excited to see my parents but also I am also excited to gather source material especially by scanning photos from the hundreds we have in photo albums. I think they will be very helpful in determining what the actually landscapes of my different feelings of home will ultimately be. I want to sketch and plan based on my findings this weekend.

Reading—6 hours

Project Proposal—1.5 hours

Journaling—5.5 hours