Home Sweet Hoard
Home Sweet Hoard is my first reckoning with the hoarding in my childhood home. It is a tunnel book made with trash, paper scraps, bills, and pictures of my home. Hoarding and the executive dysfunction and scarcity mindset that I have seen surrounding it has greatly impacted my life. The overwhelming excess causes anxiety and is also a visual metaphor for emotional overload. In the tunnel book, the black and white furniture fades into invisibility as the saturated colors overtake the composition and the your mind. I collaged paper scraps with personal items from my own trash and belongings to emphasize how intimate this issue is.
I feel very conflicted about how to explore my emotions on this topic further because of how it may impact others in my life. Mental illness is so difficult to live with and to witness in loved ones and being on either side can be extremely difficult. I hope that I can continue to find ways to carefully explore my experiences and trauma that overlap with my loved ones’ experiences or were caused by them. Good and bad can and do coexist in my memories and life. Love and trauma are juxtaposed and married. Everything piles together to create the world that I recall bits and pieces of.
