Navigating Emotions of Home

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This visual essay explores the stand-alone home through an autoethnographic account comprising a constellation of theoretical analysis, paintings and personal narrative. By attending to Sara Ahmed’s writing on affect, the theoretical analysis examines the boundary of the home as a source of both “with-ness” and “against-ness,” revealing the complexity of the ideal home. Paintings are used as an investigative tool to consider the material, symbolic and affective relations which underwrite the figure of the stand-alone home and the process of making a home. Adopting the seemingly contradictory notions of “with-ness”—belonging, connection, security—and “against-ness”—anxiety—enables a critical gaze to be cast on the stand-alone home as a pervasive and often invisible type of social spatial organisation, of “the good life.”