Georgia House #1- part 2

This is the first house I lived in on Georgia St in Vancouver. I lived there during 2008-9. I lived with a woman named Zinnia and her cats (to which I know no names- this was before I became a cat person). In fact I was so anti-cat I constructed a device that would scare the cats away from my room if they crossed a light sensor on the threshold. Who knew only a couple of years later I would be starting (and quickly abandoning) projects like transguyswithcats.


I got peanut salmonella while I lived here, from eating dumpstered Clif bars that had been recalled, trashed, picked up by Zinnia's date and then scarfed by me. Salmonella is gross shit. No thank you.


I started this model without a clear idea of what I would do at each step. This is the first prototype of the series essentially. It had been a while since I had made anything, and this one started my brain working back it the measuring, cutting, clamping, measuring, clamping, cutting, gluing, kinds of ways. It has consisted of mostly scavenged wood (some purchased scraps from homodepot), bristol and plastic that was both scavenged and from Urban Source on Main St. The front siding was a set of old wooden venetian blinds that my dad had in his burn pile.


I built some small furniture and painted the house with cheap kids acrylics. The colours and room scales are all to my own choosing, vaguely based on vagu-er memories. The living room seems huge compared to the other rooms, as it did. The bedroom seemed filled by the bed and large oak desk that had to have a leg removed to fit through the window to get it inside, as it does in the model. Some things, like closets and stairways were left out. The interiors of the 3 other suites in the building are left empty; not my homes. I left the side and rear walls partial/off for ease of seeing in and maneuvering things in the house.

OK, so some background

Before I get ahead of myself posting all the photos I will tell you a bit about this project. I started it a little earlier this year after my 13th move in 6 years. I kept telling myself that I was done moving and yet over and over again I kept moving.


I moved for space, I moved for love, I moved as love changed and relationships ended, I moved as I needed to find myself, find new things, find new ways of being.


Every time I moved, started over, set up another space as home (all of the places I counted in the 13 were places I stayed for at least 3 months- the ones that were "temporary" didn't make the cut) I found ways to do that worked better, answered and wrote new equations into the problems of:


What is home?


What is it made of?


How is it made/put together/arranged?


I transitioned during this process (somewhere over the course of houses 3-7) and also pose myself with the questions:


How are home making and building of homes differently gendered and viewed positions within the same process? How do I undertake both?




I started by referencing images of each of the houses I have lived in since getting my first apartment at 19. I had to use google maps street view to find some of them because I didn't really remember them all vividly enough to reincarnate them as a miniature. I found them, traced them, sketched them and began the long process of building them. I expect it will take me a very long time to get through all of them, and I expect that by the time I get to the most complicated I will be working on them from a home which I will not leave in 6 months. I am preparing to move to the woods and build a home that's real size. A home that I can raise my babies in and organize my community from. And before I do that I want to take a really solid inventory of what I have learned about home. So, through the journey of my hands, I will get right into each house, what made it a home, what lessons I would like to leave, and the wisdom I have gleaned along the way that has woven it's way into my understanding of home, love and growth.

Starting Off

This is the first post of progress of my newest project, all about making home, but mini. I am doing this for a lot of reasons, but here's what I told the maker faire people about it. I will be showing the starts of my work at MAKER FAIRE coming up on the 25 +26th of this month. Come check it out
:


After 13 moves, 40 room mates, over 6 years, multi-disciplinary maker HKori Doty has explored the ideas surrounding home, the lessons learned in each one, and attempted to translate these abstract and elusive ideas and experiences into something that makes sense to them. Starting with 2 dimensions and working into the third, HKori’s project takes an inventory of “home” through the creation of miniatures of their past dwellings, integrating the lessons learned in each, into the construction of the models.


These photos are of the first stage of building the model of the first house I lived in on Georgia St. I picked it to start with because it was the most of a square. Stay tuned as I post more photos of the development of the 3d mini models and the stories to go along with them.