Rebecca Arthur

A year later, home is…? What a huge question to ask today, and even a year ago. If you were lucky enough to attend our show, you would know that you’d most likely be greeted at the door with a plate of cookies and the option for coffee or tea. If you decided to take us up on this offer, you may have been invited to join in on a poetry reading and given a place to sit on our giant carpet that lye hugged to a cozy corner where stories were shared. Histories, passages and trails forked together somehow to meet here. To be in the presence of our gallery space was supposed to feel like home, like stepping into another extension of your residence— finding semblances between yourself and strangers, who soon would become acquaintances, friends, and visitors tuning in now, one year later. 

A year ago, I was longing for a home that existed somewhere in the future. At the time, I was going through what felt like a crisis. It was culture shock mostly, but it felt amplified by the confrontation it forced me to have with my Blackness outside of the context of my home country. In the previous show, I wrote about the word un-suturing, a term I heard while attending a lecture about Whiteness. The lecturer described it as a sort of unraveling or ripping at the seams that occurs when you come to a realization about something that affects you so deeply, it opens a wound. The images I shared then depicted the process of my un-suturing, a slow decay that left insecurities open to be questioned and analysed. I was trying to comprehend how to create a home within myself even though my walls had been knocked down. I was attempting to suture the wounds I inflicted through my own internalised insecurities and perceptions of my Blackness.

The images I’m sharing today are documentations of my existence over the past two weeks, as I’ve been quarantining in my house after my roommate tested positive for COVID-19. Trying to write about “home” throughout my confinement has made any remembrance of it feel lost. My days run together and my concept of time and history feel altered by the still nature of my present life. For countless nights, I’ve dreamt about the house I grew up in and all of the places I’ve lived— my brain forming worlds for these memories in the night, twisting thoughts and time, trading places and faces, and offering hostel to passer-by. It feels like everything I’ve ever known to be home is crashing into each other, like shaking a snow globe and watching the sparkles flit and settle through the glass. These dreams have become routine for my mind; prompting itself with the histories that led me to this point, to remind me that I am here. As a way for me to check in, and recognise the space I inhabit— these polaroids serve as a testament to my presence and sense of being during a time when it was limited to the perimeters of my bedroom, and memories of past dwellings. I believe these images showcase the home that I was longing for last December— a sense of self-assurance that had to be wounded in order to evolve.

“These polaroids serve as a testament to my presence”