find your way back home
find your way back home
‘Find your way back home” is inspired by the family I created away from home, and creating this sense of security and home with these people felt like finding my footing and finding my way back home. For this piece I utilised foam board, fabric and paper layering.
Moodboard and inspiration:
The inspiration for this piece was mostly these type of apartment complexes, especially in the area my friends and I grew up in, we had a lot of these types of residential areas. At a younger age and especially through the pandemic, we envisioned ourselves moving out together into an apartment like this. This childlike fantasy is reflected in the style used to make the final piece. The use of foam boards, small wooden sticks and the layered paper for the scenes are all reminiscent of the projects we used to create when we were smaller.
the apartment near our school/ in our neighbourhood growing up.
Practice with materials:
Sketches:
I wanted my initial plans to feel messy and unpolished, as though they were doodles from a child’s notebook.
Using crayons instead of fine art tools emphasised this playful and spontaneous approach, rejecting perfection in favour of authenticity.
The disorganised layout mirrors how children imagine worlds—rough ideas and colours thrown together without concern for neatness.
Photoshoot:
To create the scenes in each of the windows, instead of editing the photos onto the colourful background, I printed the colourful background separately to the subjects, and glued them on top of each other, similar to the collages that are created by children when scrapbooking with friends. This is mimicking scrapbooking an ideal life.
Final Piece:
The empty windows leave for new memories to be made together.
I used colourful LED bulbs to create the typical lighting of LED strip lights in a teenage bedroom.
I did some experimentation with different materials before the final piece. I had the idea of using wire for the figures instead, but I realised would be a lot more emotive with the pictures of my friends instead of wire, which would not be able to convey the stories I intended in the same way.
