D. Dickey

What makes a home? The answer can be simple or complicated. It can be tied to a family or a city or a time in your life. For some, it is the house their grandparents grew up in, their parents grew up in, and that they grew up in. For others, it is a town where everyone knows their name. Sometimes it’s the small domestic touches of family heirlooms and childhood toys. Other times it’s a bevy of family photographs and physical traits that stretch back generations. Maybe it’s a certain group of friends or a particularly beloved pet. Home means different things across different cultures, whether it’s tied to the land or to ancestors or to a good source of water or a favorite meal. Maybe home is a rereading a favorite childhood book or holding a teddy bear that has moved from house to house to apartment to dorm room and beyond. For me, “home” is some combination of all of these things, a patchwork quilt of people, places, objects, and emotions. It is a creation of memory and experience. Home is also a question mark. It is nebulous and fractured and fraught with many negative connotations.

This work is about home: how it’s found, how it’s lost, and how it’s created. It’s about my personal experience with home after having a semi-nomadic childhood, explored through textual and visual analysis. I want to highlight the dissonance between traditional imagery surrounding “home” and my lived experiences. These photographs and pieces are focused on the different places I remember as home, the fractured experience of my home life, and the threads of craft and homemaking that tie my past together with my future.

D. Dickey '16