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.
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.
