Unconventional Mobile Domiciles

ABSTRACT My thesis explores the fascination I have towards unconventional mobile domiciles, or, in other words, non-traditional residences that are also moveable or mobile. My adolescent years were unconventional, as I was raised by parents who maintained a variety of odd jobs and lived a transient life, especially as missionaries. During my adolescence we lived in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Canada. During our travels, we often housed in personalized recreational vehicles, often cobbled together from recycled or found materials. My thesis exhibition examines the meanings—social, personal, and creative—that one can find in these strange and dynamic structures. My art portrays “domiciles” or residences that are attached to vehicles that normally wouldn’t be found within the common range of housing structures. By avoiding conventional mobile homes, recreation vehicles, and other mass-produced manufactured mobile houses, I am able to explore the endless combinations of creative domiciles and a wide variety of modes of transportation, thereby creating a new language of domesticity and mobility, home and movement. The meanings I hope viewers find in my work include questions of conventions—what makes something normal or conventional, and are these norms always the best way to live? What does it mean to have a home? Does a home always have to be fixed in space or can it be mobile and dynamic? If it can be unfixed in time and space, how then do humans relate to their domiciles? What does it mean to reside somewhere? I believe these questions go to the very core of our humanity and our relationship as humans within our environment.