Finding Home

“The old saying 'we bring our lares with us' has many variations”. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Topoanalysis is the “psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives”(Bachelard). This body of work is a personal journey to revisit the intimate spaces of my past. I lived in eleven homes in twenty years, and this return to these intimate sites asks the question, “what was home?” My memories and experience of these spaces are fractured. Phototherapy uses a technique called "projective identification", a method by which emotions are externalised into another object so they can be identified with at a safe distance. By containing these places I revisit in a photograph, I am given time to look at them, reflect on them and consider their meaning. If the phrase “we bring our lares with us” has any truth, then the photographic image is the synthesis of a lived experience.