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LAST ISSUE I WROTE ABOUT ART AND HOW WE ALL EMOTIONALLY BENEFIT FROM MAKING REPRESENTATIONS OF HOW WE THINK OR FEEL. THIS TIME I WILL ATTEMPT TO PULL APART WHAT HOME IS.

In many respects, our lives revolve around the cultural construct of what we call home. Like the word love, home is loaded with happiness, joy, pain, and disappointment. Inevitably, when we think about home, we think about family. It is worth noting that a house is not a home. Many people live in houses but have no home. Similarly, many people have a home but do not have a house. Nonetheless, a house is a marker of a specific time and place in our own history. Environments remain important to who we are. You, me, and the kid down the road – our understanding of home is each to their own. For me personally, home has many different layers.

My early home life, like many, was fractured. It was a complex mix of amazing and terrible. Sights, smells, and sounds take me back to the good life – or what I imagine it to have been. Memories of my mother’s green thumb, apricot chicken, and good taste delight my senses and send me on sweet daydreams. My father’s work ethic drives me forward to have a good life. I dream of recreating these comfortable feelings and long to be able to reach out and touch them. But in the clear light of day, amongst these nuggets of gold, is a fractured and distant family. It is true when they say time heals, although sometimes I wonder whose watch we are going by. Old pains and unaddressed wounds are, quite frankly, still eating at me.

Like many Queers – alternatives and not normals included – I have sought to find my home in other spaces. Like it was for so many others, the library – the Holy Grail of all safe spaces – was my home. It was where I found connection with other alternative people seeking a bit of peace and quiet. Once I found home in a sporting team that accepted me for who I was. There, invaluable relationships were formed and, in hindsight, saved me from the brink of self-destruction. Oh, and to my darling, delightfully dysfunctional community of adult clubs, queer night spots and bush raves – you all have a special place in my construct of home. The things I’ve done, the friends I’ve made (and lost) have all compounded into particular memories and multiple feelings of home. Another part of my understanding of home is about becoming me and being comfortable (or not comfortable) with and in my body, and with my social identity.

Our feelings are our sense of home, and our bodies and how society understands us is a part of that home. Remember, muddled in our understanding of home is a deep need for safety and belonging. Until I claimed my identity, which has had several evolutions, I could never feel at ease or safe with myself.

It is through my collections of spaces and places I call home that the chances of my life being more happy, fruitful, and full of love increase.

At this current stage of my life, home is living in rural Tasmania, building a community of friends, and inviting as little drama into my life as possible. Home is long walks in the countryside that hug and love me with bountiful offerings of peace and quiet. If I were entering the Artfully Queer exhibition, I would enter an Australian landscape with blue purple skies. Because, home for me right now is knowing what home looks like and being peaceful with that.