Marian Macken
At Home
I
Kitchen sink with a saucepan soaking; faded tea towels
and a vegetable peeler.
Almost dry washing in glorious sunset colours held in
place with pink pegs in low-angled sun.
That same sun passing through a jar with a white rose to a
metal bowl in a double-tiered drying rack, making green
dishwashing liquid luminous.
In his recent book, Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness, Emanuele Coccia reminds us that a home is created, first, through our choices: ‘a series of gestures through which we gather a relatively incompatible set of objects, people and walls, and transform them into a special place – into our world.’[i] A home, therefore, does not exist per se, but rather homemaking: the act of tending and attending to the domestic – both its people and possessions.
This set of objects that we gather, referred to by Coccia, is likely to include the category of furniture and its accoutrements: chairs, pot plants, books, cushions, rugs, artworks. These we arrange and occupy demonstrating social relationships and aesthetic choices. There is a history of understanding the domestic interior through inhabitants’ belongings and their organisation: Walter Benjamin, in The Arcades Project, considers the bourgeois interior of the nineteenth century in which these household objects became material assets imbued with status; acquisitions and composition allow us to read spaces’ meanings.
But there are other crucial household objects, often less considered, that are equally important: spoons, pegs, dishcloths, repurposed yoghurt containers, clothes airers. These respond to processes and habits – how a home operates – and are reached for when in the flow of action. Hence, they become ‘extensions of our body simply because they are animated by the same life that gives life to it’, Coccia tells us – and so we imbue our household objects with ourselves.[ii]
Benjamin saw the interior as a void until filled with, and therefore defined by, the objects within it. But it is these other perhaps more ordinary items that show us inhabitation. They are used and moved, arranged and rearranged – continuously negotiated with – as we step through our days. Sylvia Lavin writes, ‘The interior is produced not by walls and other boundaries but by the order, array, and number of objects within, which coalesce into a perceptible environment, not despite their generally varied and unpredictable presence, but by virtue of their objecthood independent of the envelope that contains them.’[iii] The architecture of the home is different from that of the house.
We live in our home.
II
Steamed dumplings on a wicker plate, ready.
A hand on a benchtop, mid-wipe, tracing a repetitive arc.
Water flowing from a tap, filling, rinsing, sloshing.
There is time that relates to epochal shifts and sudden change, seismic activity and pivotal moments. Then there is time that is repetitive and cyclic and, in its slowness, seems not to pass. Lisa Baraitser, in Enduring Time, parses the particularities of this time as being defined by acts of ‘staying, maintaining, repeating, delaying, enduring, waiting, recalling and remaining.’[iv] But this slow time is not interminable or boring. Rather, it is suspended and alive.
Baraitser points out that to maintain means keeping something going in a steady state. And to maintain is also ‘to underpin, to prop up from below, to hold up when something or someone is flagging’.[v] And so, she reasons, maintenance is the temporal dimension of care, a durational practice to ‘keep “things” going: objects, selves, systems, hopes, ideals, networks, communities, relationships, institutions’.[vi] Care, then, is active and vigilant, responsive and corresponding.
Maintaining and continuing the world of our homes – keeping house – requires quiet effort and unseen labour, not just towards objects but also towards the people within. Attending to processes of cooking and cleaning, gardening and growing, fixing and repairing, asks for continued observation and ongoing service: it requires presence.
Our presence enables the space of the house to become the place of home.
III
Filtered light through white curtains; fabric in front of reflective glass.
An orchid leaning into the rays; hydrangeas in a vase.
Light on hair, a mirrored silhouette.
Hazy patterned shadows.
Pink roses casting doubled flowers on a back fence.
The edges of our houses mediate between us and the world; they protect us from weather and seal us from external harm. Windows and their fabric filter light; their internal floors and walls receive these rays. Cast shadows require a source, caster, and screen: sun, curtain, and interior wall. Three simple ingredients yet magical in combination.
Rooms create volumes and so contain these shadows; three-dimensional boundaries hold and become made of these patterns, form is delineated.
Traces of light allow us to turn inward. We watch how the light gets in; we watch it subtly change. We become attuned to atmosphere and interior weather.
We sit and are stilled.
IV
The home is composed of elements and processes, objects and circumstances, all with their own temporalities. It can be thought of as an environment and ecosystem – full of diversity, dependencies and habits; it is alive. And so, it is never finished. It is in flux, always in production, continually changing and aging, unfolding.
The interiors of homes are made and experienced. How, though, do we represent them? Paul Carter writes, ‘Our world is composed of the traces of movement but our representations conceal this.’[vii] We have become habituated to stylised interiors aspirationally free of lived-in-ness and real estate images of houses scrubbed of their idiosyncrasies. Sarah Treadwell notes that conventional representational systems ‘tend to fail the full circumstances of interiority, collecting instead picturesque or conventional forms and resisting the complexity of the condition.’[viii] They freeze time, freeze out time, into static moments.
One day recently I babysat for friends. During the child’s afternoon nap, I found myself in a quiet and absolutely still house yet knowing this could change at any moment. It has been twenty years since I was commonly in this situation with my own child. And I remembered the joy of these moments. The gift of time to do nothing but be a presence in a house, attuned to the ending of this stillness, ready to act. Yet knowing this experience of held time was impossible to document.
How then do we picture the intimacy of living? How do make a portrait of the home? Of homemaking? How do we honour the maintenance of care?
We pause.
We look up.
We notice those those who are affected by and invested in
us: the home we are in and the home within us.
References
[i] Emanuele Coccia, Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness, trans. Richard Dixon (Penguin Random House, 2024), 22.
[ii] Coccia, Philosophy of the Home, 66.
[iii] Sylvia Lavin, “Architecture in Extremis,” Log 22 (2011): 58.
[iv] Lisa Baraitser, Enduring Time (Bloomsbury, 2017), 2–3.
[v] Baraitser, Enduring Time, 52–3.
[vi] Baraitser, Enduring Time, 49.
[vii] Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design (University of Hawaii Press), 5.
[viii] Sarah Treadwell, “Writing/Drawing: Negotiating the Perils and Pleasures of Interiority,” Idea Journal 12, no. 1 (2012): 2.
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