Hayley Nash

What makes a place a home? A home is a place where an individual or family lives, a place that brings a sense of belonging because it provides safety, security, comfort, and familiarity. A home can be any type of dwelling that also has emotional connections and memories from those who live there. It is a place where people can be themselves and are free to do what they want. It is built and decorated to reflect the personalities and tastes of the people who occupy the space. The transition from space to home is a process like no other because it is how one builds, finds, and incorporates a feeling that is true to who may be living there.

I had the chance to discover how a place becomes a home during different time periods in my home state of Arizona. I compared the structure, process, and materials of building pueblo adobe style homes of the past to modern contemporary homes of the present. For my art exhibition, I wanted to bring a piece of Arizona back to Ohio. To do this I took many photos of historical adobe sites in Arizona so that I could recreate them using photogrammetry. This software that stitches together thousands of photos to create a 3-D model. This allowed me to turn the historical sites into 3-D prints while also creating them for viewers to experience in a virtual reality setting. My 3D-prints combine materials that are as old as the earth and as new as PLA filament used with the 3-D printing technology. A mold I designed as the floorplan of my house will act as is aa shelf in my exhibition which will hold personal objects that help portray items or memories that made me feel at home while growing up. Along with this, I used the mold to make adobe bricks which contained Ohioan soil, water, hay, ball clay, and Portland cement. Modern homes today do not depend on materials from the land leading one to wonder how this impacts our sense of home and place. The change in materials and purpose of homes are all important factors that contribute to how we experience these dwellings.

My intention for the viewers of my exhibition is to represent Arizona home architecture and show how a place becomes a home for those who live there. I hope the viewers can learn about Arizona homes while also trying to understand what home means to them. In the past homes were built from earthen materials and the process required the efforts of an entire village. Today, homes are constructed of more modern materials and are made by professionals instead of those who live there. Modern homes of today were inspired by the pueblo homes of the past. A place does not become a home only because of the style and structure but from the feeling a person gets from belonging in a space they can call their own.

Hayley Nash ‘23