"lonesome valley"

When we first started this project, I was exploring the idea of building a tiny utopian world. The control over that environment that I would be building seemed like a perfect metaphor for the way life feels out of control and people feel the need to control the environments around us. I was looking forward to meticulously placing each detail into the world with love and care and precision. It seems to me that I am one of those people that when life is spinning out of control, that I grab onto the tangible world for comfort. It seems cathartic to me somehow.
So, I went to hobby lobby and purchased a plethora of tiny objects to put into my little world. On the way to school the next day that week I got a flat tire with no spare to back it up. The whole week we didn’t have class I was essentially without a car and was in dire need to simplify the project in order to make it plausible. I was literally transporting things to campus by shopping cart. I returned the tiny living room set I had bought for one of the houses in order to have money to buy a new tire. At this point I needed to simplify the idea of my project. I needed to cut off the fat and get to the meat of the idea. I was looking for a world that seemed safe and perfect and far away for the troubles of reality. I could get that same effect of soothing calm by simply going into a space that I could manipulate the tiny world around me. I found the space that I later did my piece in and hung out in there for about an hour to get to know the environment I was entering.
Next, I gathered cardboard boxes from my work to maker objects from. This quickly morphed from creating objects to painting everything in my little reality to be acceptable to me in that space. I am a self confessed painter at heart and I guess it truly came out in this piece. I seem to paint in my own style and every object in the space seemed to be a continuation of the canvas itself. People who look at my work tell me that the paintings seem to embody a specific reality that I create for myself and go to myself when I am in the process.
This piece is very much about finding a spot in the world where you feel safe. At this point in my life I feel very uprooted and nomadic. We as students are constantly changing and morphing and moving. I have lived in four different places in the past three years. My home in Texas no longer feels like the same place that I seeked comfort my whole life. It’s a very lonesome way to go though life and enclosed a few memories from my childhood in the space itself. One being the mockingbird painting as a symbol of the happy times I had out in the country as a child, and the other being the lyrics of the Carter Family song “Lonesome Valley,” which my mother used to sing to us as children. The lyrics of the song embody the human condition of restlessness and loneliness, which I seem to feel all of the time. The space I created truly made me feel at home. I think this result was a success in the end.