Grown Home

For the investigation, “Grown Home,” I began thinking very broadly about the natural world and wound up addressing my personal connection to specific plants. I see each painting and drawing as an individual step in working through questions about belonging, spaces, and the role of nature in our world.

 

There are many places I call home, but I am never a permanent part of those places. I feel a strong connection to the “natural” objects in these places but do not feel as natural in those places as the plants do. This is how I attempt to represent myself in the series: an umbrella between my grandma’s birch and passionfruit, a fence separating my mom’s hostas from my uncle’s, a glass pane that reflects my dad’s beloved orchids. I am the in-between that is rooted in the middle ground. In a sense, the plants I depict belong to the space more than I do and act as my visual and sentimental anchor; the plant becomes a kind of marker of the past and present that defines my sense of feeling “at home.”