Home?

Where the sense of place is subtle and creepy. Creepy as is ‘it creeps’.

It is something unique to the home and to the people who live there. They are places of particular time/space significance and very mutable places all the same – at least in my case there is rarely a room that has just one function or specific kind of ‘memory’ attached to it. Even hallways constantly change to suit the occupants. Mess or tidy? In or out? A good place for phone calls and quiet nothings. The sense creeps in with the artful and incidental arrangement of things, the space they occupy and the space that they don’t.

A tacit knowledge of the home seems to surface when a new something is to be introduced into a person room of how things just should be that is not entirely removed from the passively absorbed orientation that allows you to cross the room with the lights off avoiding all the mess and protruding furniture without fear. There is an emotional sense that haunts hallways and stairs especially, bathrooms and other unobserved places that allow for a passing and intense privacy, allowing things to linger in secret, quite distinct from the communal spirit of kitchens and living rooms.

It is these variety that make up the entire spirit of ‘home’; the small spaces that you hid in and the large ones we meet in, their relationship to each other and their overlapping uses as escape routes. That these places are used makes them. They are made differently for every perspective. It would be odd to try to pin such an elusive concept securely down.