As People head home for the holidays, artists are asking what and where is home? What is it to you? Read my blog to find out.

I was tired. I had slept on the floor in a corner of a Greyhound bus depot with my head in my knees waiting for my connection. I slugged back a coffee from the hissing, vending machine to have enough energy to climb the steep bus steps. The bus was full but dark and sleepy as the last Winnipeg lights whipped by through the window. Gradually, the lights stopped as we hit the open Canadian prairie and the bus windows went black. The only sounds were the hum of the bus and the occasional dry cough.

      Soon a golden sliver of light appeared on the horizon turning the blackness to a dim grey. Moments later the whole interior of the bus was painted in golden light as the rays of the glowing sun burst above the edge of the earth. It hit the backs of our eyes and we gazed in awe at how the sunrise was framed like a piece of art by the bus wind shield. The bus got very warm; it was like the sky was giving us a hug.

     The bus driver picked up his c.b. mic. His thumb hit the red button and clicked the frequency wide open.

      “Folks…it just doesn’t get any better than this!”

       The whole bus erupted in cheers and applause. The bus driver laughed into his mic.

      “My name is Ken, “continued Ken, “We will be arriving in Sault St. Marie at 11 pm.”

       A rowdy guy in the back of the bus yelled, “Whooooooo! Yeah, Ken!”

       We all clapped and cheered again, but this time for Ken.

       An Indigenous woman across the aisle looked at me and leaned over.

     “The Creator is giving us a great day”, She said to me with a beautiful smile. I was touched that she was telling me that I was included. She told me her name was Sharon.

       From then on all the way to the Sault the energy on the bus was charged from the solar rays of the sun. Everyone was meeting and talking, exchanging names, places and snacks and going up to the front of the bus to talk to Ken. The rowdy guy at the back was playing Led Zeppelin on his acoustic guitar and taking yelled out requests.

       “Brother, I don’t know that one.” He would say, “Wait…maybe I do…..” and then strum into another intro on his guitar.

        The girl sitting beside me had just broken up with her boyfriend and was crying into the travel pack of Kleenex that I had given her. I listened to her pain and tried to help her through it because it’s part of the sisterhood. We were a rolling family community center and not just people on a bus.

        By the time we had wound around the Great Lakes to Sault Saint Marie, Super-mom Sharon had finished studying for her final nursing exam, kept her 2 kids in line by teaching them a homeschool lesson with homework and sufficiently talked me out of doing any more hitchhiking.

       “Stay on a bus”, she warned. She squeezed my arm like a mom would do.

        When we got to the Sault, Ken was finishing his shift and everyone was stepping off the bus to hug him goodbye! He felt like a dad and smelled like a thermos.

       “Goodbye dear”, he said, “Have a good trip.”

      I had to switch over to a different bus to continue to Montreal. That bus felt cold, quiet and anonymous and back to the normal atmosphere.   At least I could finally sleep. But as I watched my newly found and now lost community pulling out and heading to Toronto, I felt like I had just made the biggest mistake of my life and I didn’t sleep a wink.

      For me, for a small fraction of time, home was on a moving bus. It was more home then actually being at home! How do you remember the feeling of being home? The feeling or idea of home is a hot topic for artists. Here are three examples:

     Suh Hee Sun is a Korean artist and painter who paints homes as irregular shapes with drawn vertical and horizontal lines across them. She does this in layers bringing a physical depth to the canvas to give them a sense of history. The shape of the homes might just look like colourful irregular shapes but they operate as containers that hold emotions, memories and experiences while the drawings of intersecting lines represent meaningful relationships.

     Todd Hido is an American artist and photographer famous for his series, “Houses at Night”. “Houses at Night” are just that. Hido drove around neighbourhoods at night and took long exposure photographs of average American homes through his car window. The photos have an eerie cinematic quality with their muted colours and brightly lit windows. While Suh Hee Sun builds history and invites the viewer to see connections in her paintings, Tom Hido focuses on isolation and obscuring details that create history. The viewer can’t see inside the homes or see any of the people who might be cocooned inside, they can only try to place their own memories within the homes.

     Maurizio Cattelan is an artist who works with taxidermy animals in large, absurd and horrifying installations. But his piece “Bidibidobidiboo” is a miniature set. A little squirrel lies dead in his chair at a tiny kitchen table. The title is the spell that transformed Cinderella in the movie but it appears to have not helped the little squirrel. The pieces of furniture are an exact miniature replica of the furniture the artist grew up with in his family home in Italy. The time spent in his childhood home must have been a difficult experience.

      As Christmas nears and people begin their pilgrimages to their birth towns, families and cultural communities, I invite you to think about what and where home is to you and maybe express it in art.