At the start of the year, before the Covid Lock-down, I began fashioning little houses, shelters and shacks from clay.

I would make these at the end of a day in my studio, resting-in-the-play of creating them.  I had no intention of making as many as I have. They just kept emerging. Small, larger, and then small again. Huts and houses; cottages and cabins; and some that look like they could be from the future.

As a small child playing with the neighbourhood children, we’d build shelters of some kind or another: bed-linen tents: magical wigwams; sturdy and rickety tree-houses; underground burrows and make-shift shacks from found-anythings. We would gather and build, proclaiming dominion in our childhood kingdoms, and in finding safety from ‘the baddies’. 

We all began school. The play stopped.

Pat and I have always loved home-making. Having just settled in our new home (after a grueling four years of renovating what was a total derelict) perhaps I subconsciously began reflecting on what ‘home’. means, and of what ‘home’ provides.

The Lock-down has seen many of us re-evaluate our living space; that it be a place of shelter and of sanctuary where we perhaps now not only find rest of an evening, but where we more than before prepare our meals; where we work; learn; teach; and even where we now plant, grow and harvest; and then that it be a place where we connect more intimately than before with family and close friends to celebrate and to mourn. Hopefully too, our homes have become a place where we play and create, discover and Find Things.

I will continue to show some of these little musings alongside my mixed-media works on Instagram and Facebook, and I certainly will continue to play and to rest in them as I reflect with deep gratitude for the home we call Hope Streams.