Response 15 - HomeTownNation

Dear Alan,

Thanks for the task to make five drawings of Stensballe, Horsens, Jutland, Denmark, Nation as such. I enjoyed the simplicity of this task while I still found that it generated some complexity in my ideas about the boundaries and definitions of ‘home’ and ‘nation’. It also became an interesting exercise in building my worldview with scissors and a glue stick.

I love studying maps; I think it satisfies a part of my brain that craves order and structure. So, Google Maps became my go-to place for this task, both for screen shots but also to reproduce maps with paper cuttings. I constructed collages to represent each of the locations and decided that collages 1, 3 and 5 would be a mix of drawing, pasting and constructing, while collages 2 and 4 would be actual prints of areas with representations of the maps that went before it. Here they are:

This is a drawing with prints from street view on Google Maps of the places and houses we (and Lisa in particular) visit

This is a print of the maps with a small version of the Stensballe collage inserted

This is a construction of the (for me) familiar shape of this peninsula again with prints of locations and places that we know

As collage no 2, this is a print out of the map with small version of other aspects of Denmark

For the final collage I inserted all of the collages and images from 1-4 and added Leeds, Cork and Ireland/UK to represent my feelings of what I feel is my wider nation as such.

The fjord around Horsens defines the land and the area we live in and so the construction of both Stensballe and Jutland came to being through marking the boundaries of the land with the surrounding fjord and sea. This was in many ways helpful to shape the image I have of each place and also to clarify some degree of boundaries between each location. The task as a whole brought back memories of the short film, below, I made in 2017 (I’m right there and you’re there) where I’m thinking about relocating from Leeds to Horsens. Like this task, the film is trying to deal with what I consider home and where my ‘nation’ begins and ends.

 

Imagining that I should explain the ‘drawings’ to our daughter Lisa steered my construction of each collage. How could I give her an impression of where she lives and where she is from while still trying to accurately represent the scale of the world she knows? The choice to include an aspect of each drawing into the next drawing (as your task requested) created a mise-en-abyme effect (where a copy of each image is placed within itself) giving me a sense of zooming out from our local neighbourhood to Europe as my wider sense of home.

See here for next task.