Home As An Inner Geography
We never fully leave the places we once called home because home is not only a location. It becomes an inner geography made from streets, rooms, light, weather, smells, voices, family habits, fears, jokes, and small rituals. Even after leaving, the first place continues to live inside the body as memory and instinct. This is why I often return to doubled faces, layered bodies, and symbolic portraits in my artwork. They show a person carrying more than one place inside themselves, as if every departure leaves a hidden map beneath the skin.
The Places That Remain In The Body
A former home can remain in the body in ways that feel almost invisible. It may appear in how you speak, how you wait, how you react to authority, how you understand silence, or how certain colours and seasons affect you. These traces do not disappear when a person moves away. They become part of the self’s texture. In my drawings and art prints, this often appears through repeated motifs: eyes, flowers, borders, dark backgrounds, and mirrored faces. The image behaves like memory, returning with small differences each time.
Memory Changes The Place We Left
The place we left does not remain fixed. Memory keeps changing it. A street may become softer, a room may become darker, a childhood object may become more symbolic than it ever was in real life. Distance can make a former home feel both intimate and strange. It can become less practical and more emotional, less factual and more dreamlike. This is close to the logic of symbolic art. A flower in an artwork may not be only a flower. It can become a fragment of weather, a remembered garden, a family room, or a feeling that has no direct name.
The Double Vision Of Leaving
Leaving home often creates a double vision. One part of you lives in the present place, while another part continues to compare, remember, translate, and return. This double vision can be tender, but it can also be disorienting. You may notice the new world through the old one, and the old world through the new one. In my posters and drawings, this often appears as duality: two faces, two directions, two emotional climates inside one figure. The image does not resolve the tension. It allows both worlds to remain present.
Homes That Become Symbols
The homes we leave often become symbolic because they can no longer be entered in the same way. Even if we return, the place has changed, and we have changed too. What remains is not only the physical home, but the emotional version carried inside us. This is why symbolic portraits feel so connected to memory. A face can contain a room, a border can contain a threshold, and a dark background can contain a whole atmosphere of return. In visual art, home can become less like an address and more like a private mythology.
Carrying Old Rooms Into New Ones
When a person builds a new life, old rooms often travel with them. They appear in taste, decoration, language, food, fear, comfort, and the images that feel familiar. A new home is never completely empty; it is filled with invisible echoes from earlier places. This is especially true after emigration, when identity becomes layered by distance and memory. In my wall art, I am interested in this layering: the way a figure can seem present in one place while emotionally carrying another. The self becomes a house with more than one room.
Why Home Belongs In Symbolic Art
Home belongs in symbolic art because it is not only where we live. It is where parts of the self were first formed, and those parts continue to speak long after departure. For me, this theme naturally enters my artwork, posters, art prints, drawings, symbolic portraits, and wall art because my visual language already returns to repetition, memory, duality, and inner landscapes. We never fully leave the places we once called home. We carry them as images, reflexes, colours, and symbols, slowly redrawing them inside every new life we build.
