Social-norms, expectations, and interactions all play a heavy role in creating an individual. We may get to choose our reality, to an extent, but that choice is fueled by outside stimuli and the precedence of history.

The home is a great metaphor for social constructs, and how we are conditioned to our reality through commodity, relationships, and environment. I have moved a lot in my life, and am now a part of a transient population in a college town. A home built for a traveler’s heartbeat is meant to speak of trying to, but never really being able to grow roots. There is an expectation of what a home is, the people that inhabit one, a nuclear family. Here in Lubbock, I have observed a migratory pattern. Just like birds, who migrate, and build new nests with the changing of seasons. People come, and people go. Often time’s travelers are left missing something, someone from a place that is just beyond their grasp, and just as I have found myself, even when you return home, it’s never quite the same as when you left. You have changed, and so has it. You no longer fit within the social constructs of a previous time. You have grown in an unexpected way, that now leaves for a longing of another place and time that no longer exists.

This is a home, built to my personal scale, which is meant for a single person to inhabit at a time. This stick frame home leaves the inhabitant exposed, as the plasma cut steel that is the siding leaves openings for others to see who resides within. This feeling of exposure is magnified by the holes in the roof, and the forged steel branches that weave throughout. In this home, you are alone, and exposed. There are meant to be feelings of discomfort as viewers enter, for not fitting within social constructs can be a scary place to be.

Materials:

recovered 2x4s, plasma cut steel, fold formed steel, forged steel rod, donated laminate flooring, 330lb castors, aluminum corrugated galvanized steel roofing, past wax, recovered floor lamp, programable light, recorded audio of crickets, speaker

Size(in feet): Height 12’, Length 6’, Width 3.5’

2019