Being: Home

The word ‘home’ appears reassuringly uncomplicated, “home is the place, dwelling, or shelter in which people live” , conjuring up images of a house where we live, have lived or can imagine living, suggesting a structure which offers fixity, stability, security. But somehow this description seems inadequate. ‘Home’ has a breadth of meanings; social, economic, cultural, political, and a depth which penetrates to the heart of what it is to be human and to live in the world, connecting to concepts fundamental to humanness, such as, inhabiting and belonging. In this paper I want to pursue the idea of home as a state of being, rather than as a particular location; a state which comes about through the interaction of self and place and is characterized by feelings of ‘rightness’ and ‘completeness’, a sense of being home. One strand of enquiry that I am pursuing in my own practice is to explore our human connection with ‘nature’, a subject that is currently the focus of renewed theoretical enquiry. (In efforts to “escape the dialectical vortex of nature-society relations” as Wolfe puts it (1998). Perhaps a radical re-conception of our beliefs about self in relation to the natural world could potentially lead us to a more empathetic and fulfilling existence; a feeling of being home. David Harvey has suggested that the artificial break between ‘society’ and ‘nature’ must be eroded, rendered porous, and eventually dissolved. And, Tim Ingold has highlighted the need to dissolve the category of the social and to re-embed (human) relationships within the continuum of organic life. Clark (1997) suggests that it is time for “a re-cognition of the intimate, sensible and hectic bonds through which people and plants; devices and creatures; documents and elements take and hold their shape in relation to each other in the fabric of everyday life” . Such enquiries are being undertaken across a wide range of disciplines, including cultural geography, philosophy, anthropology and are beginning to reinvigorate creative practice. My photographic work, The Orchard, has emerged from these debates and is an enquiry into the nature of being and is, in a sense, a search for home. It seeks to explore these concepts in visual and textual form; through a number of discrete pieces, all works in progress. This paper provides a conceptual framework to this work.