Les Portes de Vallauris

June 15th, 2019

A sculpture series created for the A.I.R. Vallauris end-of residency show held at the Chapelle de la Miséricorde in Vallauris, France.In response to the architecture of the town and the Côte d’Azur region, behind each door lived my personal response object created during each interview, and beside each door stood my interviewees’ object symbolizing home.

The feeling of home exists in limbo between place and identity. For some, connotations of home take on exclusively material form; for others it is an abstract feeling — a connection to people, language and culture — or maybe it is a mixture of all of these elements. But what does it take to transform empty spaces and fill them with feeling and meaning of home? This interdisciplinary art project came in response to my desire to both explore my inconsistent relationship with a “home” identity and to discover how art can be used as a tool for language learning. Intrigues by the nuances of the French language and culture, my investigation into the creation, meaning and feeling of le chez-soi (home) loosely tests the theories outlines in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetic’s of Space.

Over the course of two months, I conducted eighteen full-length interviews in French with individuals ranging in age from 24 to 76 across seven cities in France. Guided by the writing of Nicholas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics, I viewed myself as facilitator, not maker, during my intercultural exchanges. In addition to our verbal conversation, I simultaneously directed each interviewee through an artistic exchange using clay, asking each person to create a form symbolizing their feeling of home. Through this method, I found how the universal language of art can be used to build trust between individuals and across cultures to open-up deeper levels of communication. While the purpose of my project was to collect concrete material for my senior thesis, my project expanded in personal importance with the opportunity to give others access to the therapeutic touch of clay. Ultimately, my project is rooted in understanding how language shapes meaning, memory shapes our language, and place have the power to shape memories.