For Bowen Islander Emily van Lidth de Jeude, making art provides the opportunity to delve deep into a world of experience on her subject of choice. The work she creates, like the MAMA Project, brings her audience into that world. The project she is working on now, called what.home, will explore the meaning of “home” in an increasingly globalized world.
She says people’s definitions of “home,” have been fractured by globalism, transience and social media, and she uses that fractured landscape as a foundation for art.
“You’re likely to find strong similarities between this and the MAMA Project,” says Emily. “My process, or my goal in both of these projects is to show so many diverse and scattered experiences of the theme, that you find threads of commonality throughout.” “
Emily adds that home for her, is decidedly here in coastal British Columbia.
“Between all four of my parents’ backgrounds I have quite a mix of heritage, from generations of family ranching in the Black Hills, to Mexican, Irish and Ukrainian immigrants, to my Dutch father, who brought himself to Canada just fifty years ago and yet nurtured in me the deepest connection to this land. None of us is Salish. My sense of home is informed by knowing I am living on un-ceded Salish territory. There is a lot of conflict in my heart around the fact that I don’t personally belong to any other place, but I am living as a settler here,” she says.
Emily adds that most people, she thinks, probably share some sense of conflict around the idea of home and belonging, so in what.home she aims to create a space where viewers can re-assemble their own experience and pull together across experiential divides.
To find these stories of scattered and fractured experience, Emily is interviewing people on Bowen and in the lower mainland, Victoria, Germany and Switzerland.
She’s already started this process (and you can follow snippets of these interviews online, via links at http://whathome.org) but she continues to look for more people to interview.
