This has been a really interesting challenge so far, just over two weeks in. The theme of “home” keeps coming up in all sorts of places! Some friends and I have been talking about neighboring, and how being a good neighbor can make a huge difference in daily life and in the life of a city. I worked on some house illustrations for that project right around the time the 100 Day Project was starting, and that helped kick off my theme.
I went to a talk last week at the Boston chapter of Creative Mornings. The speaker, Shawn Hesse, compared fictional zombie apocalypse stories to real disasters that have happened around the world that are connected to climate change. His main point was that in the case of a zombie apocalypse, science people have actually calculated that given a hypothetical “zombie virus”, it would only take 3 days for the virus to spread to the entire world, and civilization would fall incredibly quickly, with everyone fighting for food and resources, bands of survivors eventually finding each other to be greater threats than the zombies themselves, etc. He talked about the different hurricanes, droughts, and other climate events that have caused similar crises, and similar desperation, though on a localized scale.
The parallels are remarkable, and sort of terrifying. The thing that struck me, though, is the work people are doing in resiliency, to try to plan and prepare for disaster. He mentioned specifically the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, working to build resiliency in communities by focusing primarily on building community and connecting neighbors, along with work to build resilient infrastructure. Their theory is that infrastructure doesn’t matter if people can’t work together to take advantage of it.
I’ve been thinking about that talk all week. Then, on Tuesday we woke up at 4:30am to catch an early flight to Chicago and sneak some friend time in before our week of family time. We had the chance to visit the Art Institute of Chicago briefly with a friend who has a membership, he said we had to check out the Van Gogh exhibit, since it was closing soon.
We walked into the exhibit and the intro blurb reveals that the entire exhibit is a reflection on the artist’s experience of home. Van Gogh moved 37 times in his short 37 years, and spent a lot of time and words writing about home and belonging in letters to his brother. One of his most famous paintings is an image of his empty bedroom in the house he felt was the only place that was really his home. He was so moved by this image that he actually painted it three separate times.
Here’s what I made in week two:
A photo posted by Abigail M (@yeiouamp) on
What does home mean to you?
