Drawing from Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ (1927), psychoanalyst and philosopher, Robert D. Stolorow, reaffirms that “human existence is always embedded—a “being-in-the-world”—one’s sense of being is inseparable from the intersubjective contexts in which it is embedded and in which it is sustained or negated.” To be in the world, one must feel like they have a home in the world, to be separated from a home is to be untethered, to float—to be ‘homesick’. Homesickness is described by Dylan Trigg in his book ‘Topophobia, A Phenomenology of Anxiety’ (2017) as a fear of one’s own home when experiencing agoraphobia and anxiety, where the home is “not only [a] site of intimacy, but also [the] centre of fragmentation.” For the agoraphobe, to leave home could mean the potential loss of home, materially and metaphysically. To dwell, to be at home, requires a sense of self which is known in relation to the home within oneself. This “sense of being-at-home”, writes Trigg, “is thus a sense that derives from a certain relation to the world, in which the world is available to me as a constantly unfolding possibility, and a possibility to be possessed. If the world resists us, as it will do, then this resistance only gives us space to assert and redefine our relation to the world.”

The Umbra was made during a time of prolonged ‘homesickness' - when both my physical home and the world beyond its walls had become unfamiliar.

First shown as part of Lumina Collective’s ‘Echoes’ at the Art Gallery of Ballarat Dec 2018 - March 2019, and again at the Biennale di Fotografia Femminile, Casa del Mantegna Mantova, Italy, in 2022.