Translocation

It’s been a week in the new place and I’m still turning to the wrong side to get toilet paper, reaching the wrong way for my teacup, and sent a beaten egg in a glass measuring cup crashing on my tile floor, knocking it over because it wasn’t supposed to be there. I unpack something and put it away but with no familiar places, can’t remember which of the unknown drawers and cabinets it’s now hiding.

The behavioral patterns built in one location don’t match the new one. The first few days are disorienting when what should feel normal doesn’t. The whole process of moving to a new home is much more complicated than I expected.

Just like the moving out of a place is a discovery of how much stuff you have, moving into a place is a discovery of how you want to live. The choices in how things are organized create the routes for future behavior. Before I can start working I have to find an arrangement of things that facilitates what I want to do.

Changing a home base has many levels. The level I kept hidden in a black box was emotional, my sorrow at leaving a place I’d loved, the regular and familiar providing stability for the unknown and risky decisions of art.

I was reminded of that level by a former student and TA, Destiny Belgrave. After moving from her close college community, she then went back to Brooklyn and had to move again from the home neighborhood culture she loved. She pointed out that how draining it was depended on the level of attachment. This insight opened my black box and I saw the emotional strain kept at bay by the physical. Our peregrinations are peopled and alive, whereas in the new place, connections haven’t been made, proximities are all different and the only word for the feeling is loss.  The irritations of moving are partly a cover for the sadness at what’s past.

One way I hung on to part of myself was to set up a work area, one corner at a time. My first corner, the one I’m facing now. has a big window to my left with a sizable chunk of sky to watch the crazy rain come and go. With everything unfamiliar, it made more sense to draw what was out the window, to get to know the place and take it into myself.

The corner wasn’t mine until I put art on the walls to claim it. The first thing on my studio wall was a beautiful collage drawing by Dan Dudrow that always makes me think, is philosophical in its reference to sky and sends my thoughts in new directions every time I look at it. Then on the other wall of that corner my favorite of my newer drawings, “Causality”, a visual idea that reminds me of the limitations of thought. The choice of pictures creates a visual climate crucial to future ideas. Every picture is a place in itself, offers another world to inhabit and the thoughts it generates. Now that this room is starting to feel like my studio, my mind can get back in action.

Having given so much thought to how locations shape thoughts, how the visual qualities influence the metaphors we use, I wonder how the implications in the new space around me will shift the expression of my ideas. The clouds feel closer to me here so analogies to atmosphere and uncertainty will thrive and hopefully remind me that change is the unfolding of forward.