After the house/home project has slowed down it is picking up again and becoming real. MOVING PLANS ARE STARTING TO MOVE. Now I want to write everything down but then it just becomes a normal diary so I need to find a framework for the practicalities to make it work as a project, find an artistic perspective. It is the everyday, the normal life or the fine line between that normal life and the art that I am interested in. I don’t want to take a fracture of normal life and say this is art but find an artistic perspective for it and that is the challenge. Ok, I have planned a real house and the fact that I did that in a gallery, in an art context and the fact that what I focused on were the conversations with the audience made it for me a piece of work with a different perspective.
Next real life situation is getting our current house/home ready for sale. This is quite an emotional act as this is the only home my boys have ever known and where we put a lot of energy and time in. Although the walls of this house have listened to a lot of families over the last one hundred and seven years and we are just the current one living in here I find it hard to think another family is going to call it their home. Yes, I want a family to live in here to carry on the tradition (thinking of Julie Meyerson’s book ‘Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House).
All this preparation tasks will go in a kind of diary and I think that’s the form it will have for now. Parallel to that and what is more connected with the actual new home/house are our evenings when we are reading two Kevin McCloud books ‘Grand Designs handbook’ and ‘Principles of Home’. And what I take on board from these is the way McCloud thinks about home namely through the way you live not about what you want and think you need to have in a new home/house in a material sense. Reading these books feels like having a conversation with him and yourself about your life style and how you could improve it or just become more aware and conscious of it. I’m making lots of notes and underlining comments in these books and those comments and underlinements might become something else, maybe something physical or maybe conversations or something completely different.
Decisions we make for the home/house we are leaving are different to what they would be if we’d stay. That feels sad but I guess it’s part of a detachment process and making space for the people who will make it their home. We are trying to finish off bits that have never been finished as the whole living in a house is an open process, declutter, make it plainer so people can think themselves into the house when they come and look at it. It is almost like giving them a poem to read where there have space in between the lines and around it rather then fiction where most is articulated already.
Contacted first architect, an old friend of mine, in Austria asking if he’d be interested in working with us and finalise our plans. He is yipieeeeeee ! Need to find some other ones so we have some choice.
Awaiting three quotes for plaster work; ceiling rose in the living room and finishing and repairing coving in the dining room.
