Drawing Conversations 5: What and Where Is Home?

This one-day online international conference took place on 15th March 2024.Convened

by Greig Burgoyne and Jill Journeaux, and hosted by University for Creative Arts,

Farnham UK it sought to examine the interrelationships of drawing and concepts of

home by bringing together artists who use traditional and expanded forms of drawing

practices to consider pressing and pertinent issues of our time which centre upon

narratives and experiences of belonging. The conference asked questions about the

ways in which drawing research can intervene into, express, narrate and expound

human experiences of belonging, community, migration, displacement and refugeeism,

and how drawings can reveal the complexities of home as a psychological, physical,

familial, or territorial place.

Anna Lovatt, Associate Professor Art History, Meadows School of the Arts, SMU,

Dallas, Texas, gave the keynote on the role and scope of drawing in the work of Donald

Rodney.

A wide range of approaches and themes emerged from the event which was split into

four sessions – Home and the Imagination, Home and Memory, The Place of Home and

Constructing Home.

The first session of the conference explored Home and the Imagination. Gary Barker

opened the day with a presentation centred upon two sets of drawings; one of interiors

of a terraced house occupied by a young family, and another set made in response to

conversations with refugee families living in temporary accommodation in a repurposed

high-rise block of flats. Both sets of drawings revealed narratives that emerged from

human object relationships, and whilst the two sets of drawings articulated diXerent

world views, they were both revealed as representing as much to do with fiction as

reality. Hence Barker’s contention that ‘home is a belief’.

Laura Donkers considered the question of What and Where is Home? through an

account of a collective drawing process. The Hokianga Community Drawing Project

(2023) was used as interlocutor to garner community perceptions of home in response

to the provocation that climate change is challenging notions of belonging, community,

migration and displacement. Donkers introduced a participatory drawing methodology

2as a non-textual strategy to empower participants to disclose, express and narrate a

‘nuanced depiction of [their] lived realities’ at a time of climate crisis.

In ‘Imagine a house, imagine a home’ Susanna Crossman focused in on an exercise,

“Imagine a house” that she conceived and proposed when a new adult psychiatric art-

therapy group, based in a hospital began. In the paper Crossman draws upon on her

memoir, Home is Where we Start (Fig Tree, Penguin 2024), which interweaves the story

of her childhood in a utopian commune, with thoughts and ideas from leading thinkers

in philosophy, sociology and anthropology, to examine the many meanings of home.

This paper calls on decades of clinical drawing experience, inspired by paediatrician

and psychoanalyst Winnicott’s unstructured squiggle exercises, finding our tactile way

on the page, moving from outside to inside, from lines to meaning, and from house to

home.

Isabel Young asked: ‘What and where is home and belonging, and how does this diXer

for individuals, families, nationalities?’. Young considers how this has diXered across

time, and how drawing research can intervene into human experiences of belonging

through the lens of ancient practices. She explores how drawing acts as a catalyst to

form new relationships with home as a communal site, through a case study of ‘The

Lararium Project’ (2023) and associated development of the Roman Villa, at Butser

Ancient Farm, a living museum of experimental archaeology and re-enactment that

tests “theories about the technologies, building techniques and ways of life of ancient

people by reconstructing elements of their homes and lives” (Butser Ancient Farm,

http://www.butserancientfarm.co.uk). The project involved drawing in three forms: the making

of the Lararium, communal clay drawn votive oXerings created by museum visitors, and

the installation of the Roman mosaic in the new Roman Formal Garden constructed by

the museum community at the entrance to the Roman Villa. It demonstrates how the

merging of drawing and ancient practices can be applied to issues of our time,

specifically investigating how drawing can develop communal and collaborative

responses to home and to the cohabitation of space.

In the session Home and Memory George Saxon presented drawn video film works

that he made to explore intergenerational trauma through childhood memories of

home. The question of ‘What and where is home?’ led Saxon to towards the space of his

3formative years to find a way back to the place that was once the family home. He

framed this as a migration through time suggesting a topographical journey and an

association with place and time; to locate traces of disjointed memories and to ‘home

in’ on the residual recall of (an obsessive) childhood drawing activity. Through this

journey Saxon is able to articulate, the events of his parents post war trauma that had

stirred the early part of his childhood imaginings. His challenging and visceral videos

evoke the haunted spaces of his family home, oXering an elusive artistic recovery of

childhood memories and the theatre of his childhood experience. Through drawing

Saxon locates himself where both silence and noise in the home coexisted

uncomfortably, exploring ‘that which cannot be discussed’ and are only overheard in

whispers. He articulates the troubled territories of his parents’ endurance of war and

their respective liberation, which could not have existed without their experience of

destruction, and which provoked his childlike imaginary through drawing.

In her paper Sofya Markov considered displacement and transience in relation to

concepts of home. By questioning the methods and rules of architectural drawings she

asks if ‘home’ can be a non-permanent place, and can an architectural drawing be a

non-permanent/predetermined drawing? How can architectural drawings, which are

usually seen as a promise to be built, be non-projective and what happens when the

projective part disappears? What is the holding capacity of the architectural drawings

and what can it carry? In the second part of her paper, Markov looked at the phenomena

of displacement in relation to architecture, proposing that displacement cannot be

defined as a concept of something alone, but is a conception that encompasses

diXerent things and connects them to each other. For Markov it is important to not focus

only on the perspective of a human as a single protagonist of displacement, but also to

consider other participants; – displacement that applies to the non-human world of

ecosystems, animals, plants, minerals and landscapes, in order to frame how the

environment of global movement resonates in a myriad of ways.

Rebecca Elves uses a practice research approach to investigate how the concept of

traumatic repetition can be explored through expanded drawing practice to break, forge

and translate traumatic personal-domestic bonds. Her research arose from reviewing

interdisciplinary approaches to post-traumatic states arising from violence against

4women, seeking to bridge gaps between research into encounters with the domestic in

art, and investigations of female trauma in art, by extending artistic research beyond the

traumatic event and victim – perpetrator relationship, and towards repair of the

relationship between survivor and home in the aftermath of trauma.

In the Place of Home session Jenny Walden explored the thought of home in ways

which question how the now industrialised regions of the planet, have been pre-

disposed to consider spacing, placing or homing more in terms of defined ‘products’ of

human social organisation which stand against the natural world. ‘Configurations’ of

mapping, plans and art representations have supported this ‘othering’ of ‘home’ against

the earth and natural world, and the potential othering of peoples of indigenous

populations who have in more sustained ways, related to space and place as ongoing

interactions and mutual relations with the natural environment, where home and

dwelling have diXerent connotations of continuum with the natural world. Walden

argues that the bringing together of drawing and home is far more likely to yield studies

that are with people [and their homes] rather than of them and she positions drawing as

an improvising type of medium and a movable reciprocity between existence and

inexistence.

In Cultivating home: drawing interiors Belinda Mitchell uses Wymering Manor, a

sixteenth century house in Cosham, UK, as a case study. The house is a state of semi-

ruination and currently being cared for by a community of trustees and local volunteers

who work to remake the house for its many possible futures. The Manor is continually

arranged and rearranged for events including heritage open days, quiz nights, plays, and

paranormal activities. For these activities the community clean, make tea, cakes, and

perform as characters who once lived in the house. Through these actions the

volunteers create new material relations and intermeshing experiences. They show how

the community care about the house and care about it as a place for living well. Mitchell

asks questions about home as an improvisational space – a space of daily movement

and change, and how interiors are made. She goes onto consider how new

technologies such as LiDAR scans refigure the architectural drawing practices through

which homes are produced.

5In the final session of the conference entitled Constructing Home Paul Vivian

reflected upon his research regarding the sonorous animism of Neolithic stone circle

sites across the UK. Archaeoacoustics research has primarily focused upon structural

audio resonance examining how sound vibrates toward us. Vivian’s research draws

upon resonances originating from the stones themselves including field recordings

made at sixteen stone circle sites dated between 2000 – 4500 years old. His paper

frames these findings within the context of Hegel’s dialectical concept of determinism

and indeterminism by way of Jean Luc Nancy and Bill Brown, whilst also referencing

cultural spiritual beliefs concerning the animism of insentient objects and sites. Within

the context of this paper home is a Hegelian determinate, a collective sense of

connection to an ancestral space, yet one that is disrupted by an indeterminate agent

(object animism) forcing a dialectical tension that may fail to resolve itself remaining in

stasis, whilst drawing is framed as a form of extraction and home as an assumed space

of connection that is permanently influx.

Martha Orbach explored notions of drawing as homemaking, re-visioning, repairing,

mending, with reference to her ongoing body of work entitled To Build a Home. Through

her practice Orbach questions about how we make a home in times of crises, and how

we can create new narratives and ways of situating ourselves amidst these times of

extreme change. In response her drawings map out new possibilities – using

multispecies elements, a re-visioning of communal and private space, and sinuous

housing bound together like tree roots. Orbach proposes new ideas, ‘beyond business

as usual but greener’, urging that our adaptation and transformation in response to the

climate emergency needs to be radical, not tinkering around the edges, and arguing that

drawing is somewhere we can think and re-imagine this most fundamental of needs.

In Kinesthetic / Cartographic Memoirs: A fertile performative ground for drawing

ourselves home, Kathryn Ricketts and Nicola Visser oXered a virtual workshop using

breakout rooms. The conversations and subsequent drawings and transfers to

movement operated as catalysts for shared storying of internal and external notions,

memories and resonances of ‘home’. Participants experienced and engaged in telling

from the body, listening through line, and reflecting with their bodies in a shared story.

Ricketts and Visser argued that when we listen to one another’s stories, listening with

the ears inside our skin, we develop stronger connections to one another, and to the

6land, and that ‘in the merging and blending within the eddies of our listening, we can be

drawn by a faint silver thread that brings us home to ourselves’.

The final paper of the day was presented by Joanna Pereira and entitled Women who

are at odds with home: drawing research, feminism and ‘world’- travelling. Pereira

oXered a theoretical perspective on an embodied understanding of home from a

feminist viewpoint and contemplated issues of gender and class. She presented her

own artwork in order to address her experience of growing up in rural Portugal, and of a

childhood marked both by Catholicism and a fascist heritage characterized by an

authoritarian patriarchal society. She also shared reflections on the experience of

moving away from home when she was already an adult, and how this ‘world’-travelling’

has impacted upon her art practice and her sense of home.

Drawing conversations 5, what and where is home? was rich and multi-faceted, but

many questions and approaches overlapped, resounded and intersected, both within

and across sessions, and several key themes emerged from the conference. These

included the utilisation of drawing as a means of investigating home as a site of cultural

memory and drawing as a means of reconciliation with places of home. Several

participants explored drawing processes aligned with the unfinished and ongoing

formulation of home and with processes of making home anew, alongside ideas around

how those acts of both homemaking and drawing can encompass forms of perpetually

enclosed motion whilst exist as processes without ends. The idea that drawings can

contain images of, and also be recognised as, archives of personal narratives was

investigated, as were processes of mapping the home through drawing and potentially

releasing layers of sedimentation through that process. This related to an aligned

interest in drawing in relation to the value of objects in our homes be they totems of lost

homes, or places, and the role of objects in and from our childhood homes, and their

relationship to disruption, displacement, or trauma. Trauma and the home were key

threads throughout the event: the trauma of homelessness, trauma within the home,

and fragmentary recollections of parental trauma, all highlighted the potential

vulnerability of home and its potential to be a target and or a weakness. Displacement

was a major concern, and participants discussed methods of drawing as a means of

mapping displacement, alongside the nomadic processes of drawing and looking for

home through drawing. Others posited drawing as home and linked that concept to

7home as a space of improvisation. Drawing was recognised as a potentially caring act

and that care can be a connective action in relation to drawing ideas of home and

healing. Placemaking through cultivation as connected to drawing was identified as a

reciprocal process of care and related to drawing identity through homeland and

homes. The phenomenology of the body within the interior of the home was also

considered in several presentations, as were relationships between body, earth,

environment and home.