Settling and such...

I have noticed as my project has progressed and as I continued to photograph and work from my two "home" spaces, for example in my painting and printing, how much these spaces have changed over the course of the last 3 and a half months. The process of moving home can be seen in the taking apart of one place and creation of another as I settled into my new space. 

I found this particularly evident after returning home to Galway for the Christmas break.
My room at home had become so stripped of any personality (even more so than the initial time back at the end of the summer when I was packing up to leave for Limerick) and my bedroom in Grove has become a more comfprtable and home-y type place now.

This was such the case that when I went home for christmas my bedroom felt like quite a bleak and lifeless place to be. It was like moving all over again. It was strange as I realised, I don't really know where my home is anymore. I've been so torn between moving between Limerick and Galway that both bedrooms have become quite in-betweeny place, and maybe I've even started to feel more at home in Grove..


I started to think about this in terms of the idea of movement and I got to thinking if my new cosy bedroom in Grove was the product of myself forcing my personality onto the walls in order to speed the process of settling in along? Because I had always felt my old bedroom had been the homely familiar product of many years of personal accumilation, but maybe it's just as easy to create instant personality on the walls?



I decided to play around with this idea on the blank walls of my Galway bedroom, creating an almost temporary looking personalised wall.

But overnight the wall fell apart...

As the days turned to weeks at home in Galway my bedroom seemed to become it's cosy self that I remembered.

My room (and/or my photographs) always seems to have this orangey yellow glow, which I think gives a warm comfortable feeling. I really like the colours and the softness so I decided to do a quick painting:

  I must admit I did find it difficult leaving my cosy and familiar home to return to Limerick (even besides the thinking about the looming semester 1 assessments!) And although  I have settled more in Limerick compared to at the start of this project, I feel even more now that I am almost without a home. I feel a little bit torn between two places...

This is what my bedroom in Limerick looks like at the moment:

 

In the midst of all this comparison of bedrooms and spaces etc. I found a really lovely blog ("Nice Bedrooms and Stuff": http://nicebedrooms.tumblr.com/) which I have been obsessively ploughing my way through for the last week or so. I've found I have a real interest in space/rooms and I really enjoy exploring how different rooms can reflect a persons personality so much...