I’ve been taking an inadvertent break from blogging over the last couple of months. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and writing (I’m in the middle of writing my MA dissertation) and it felt like my head’s been full of so many things, that to try and surmise them for this blog wouldn’t work. The writing itself is becoming a piece in its own right, beyond the remit of an academic text. It’s about trace and absence with the home and it rather apt, as we’ve just moved house – I’m therefore using our house as a basis to discuss these ideas.
The move was pretty hectic (to put it mildly) and as a result of not having a kitchen for about 6 weeks, we’ve been living with my in-laws. The previous owners of our new house were rather attached to their plants – so much so, that a massive ivy was growing up the front and partially covering the bedroom window. It was really sunny on our first morning there, so I photographed the resulting shadows on the curtain from our bed. I think it was the shadows which made me think of Anthony Boswell’s work (he’s got a couple of blogs on this site).
I’ve been flicking though The Comfort of Things by Daniel Miller recently (Amazon’s ‘other people who bought this book also bought these’ proving very useful these days). It’s basically an anthropological look the interior of people’s homes, specifically the objects and things they surround themselves with. The first ‘portrait’ is about a pensioner called George whose flat is empty – he doesn’t have any things. Miller describes that ‘there is a violence to such emptiness’. It’s really sad because the empty flat effectively reflects the person who occupies it – ‘this was a man… waiting for his time on earth to be over, but who at the age of seventy-six had never yet seen his life actually begin. And, worse still, he knew it’.
