Everyone
has to leave a place they consider their home at some point. You are
confronted with the prospect of sorting through all of the things you have
collected throughout the years. They whole process can be overwhelming,
but what I didn't expect to happen when my parents decided to move out of the
home I spent most of my childhood in, was the extreme sense of alienation that
occurred as soon as we moved all of my family's things out of the house. In
the beginning I was nostalgic about the house and the surrounding woods that I
was documenting, but as time passed I felt more and more like I didn't belong. Suddenly,
my home was just a house that a new family was going to live in.
This series is about the complexity of emotions that are
involved in removing yourself and your belongings from a place. They
speak both to the romantic and sentimental feelings that naturally occur about
a place you have lived for an extended period of time, as well as the tension
and emptiness that comes when you no longer feel welcome in the place you once
called home.
By the time I was ending this project I was consumed by this
dilemma. I got to the point that I didn't even feel comfortable going
deep into my woods. At a certain point where the trees become particularly
thick, my heart would race and panic would set in. I had to turn around
and stop shooting for the day, feeling defeated. It felt as though the
woods had turned against me with every creature watching me as the stranger and
outsider. One day, after going back to the house I found people I didn't
know walking from room to room inspecting everything. I left wondering
what I was doing there and what I had hoped to gain from this project.
The process of moving my parents out of their house was a
difficult one. I slowly began to realize that I was no longer going to be
able to go there and any trace of my presence would disappear. I was
feeling the rush of memories that filled the house and the land. There
was a certain energy left behind by my family, but there was a barrier between
the place and me. I felt out of place and the rooms felt emptier to me
than ever before. They had become liminal spaces, caught between to
states, neither full nor empty.
