Welcome to my hot glue. My name is Fela Walvisch, I study fine art. Over the past weeks I've been working with the idea of home and what that means. Subconsciously, I have been mending my personal home. The physical place and the non-physical form of home. A month ago I broke up with my boyfriend and with that, I broke up with the place I lived in and my safe space. On June 5th I moved into my new place and I've focussed on making the place my home by decorating, painting, etc. Aside from these physical aspects of making an unfamiliar place my home, something clicked in my brain. To feel at home, you have to FEEL at home. Within yourself. Sounds cliché, but I found that if you don't have a sense of home and familiarity within you, how will you find that in a place?

But first, mending. Mending means that something was broken or imperfect before and you're fixing it. My home situation was always broken and strange. I have always moved around a lot, the studio where I currently live in is my 9th home. When my parents split up back in 2011, my idea of home as it being a physical place completely disappeared and I was forced to be at home another way, as I was moving back and forth between my parents every 3 days. I found home in my mom, dad, sister and boyfriends. Sometimes it felt like places like campgrounds, other cities or countries or even bars and shops felt more like home than the house that I lived in in that moment. But somehow, at the same time, I do feel a deep connection to some of the places I've lived in. The one where I lived longest, 8 years, before my parents split up, for example.

Anywho! The idea of a home, wether that being a house or a feeling, had always really inspired and interested me, as it is such a complex and personal thing (and I think one of the most essential parts of growing up).

What would I like to create? I made paintings in my last project where I was investigating children's tents made of blankets, and the womb as a metaphor for a lost safe space. I would like to make a sort of sequence, where I now show how I have mended (or started to mend) the problems I was facing in my last work.

Some of my last work:

What form or material do I want to work with?

I'd like to work with painting or drawing again, as I haven't done that in a while and I feel like I can deepen it out more. I either want to make big paintings, but due to the lack of space I would also like trying some sort of illustration style or printing technique, to make the complex feelings behind the project more easy to take in.

I've noticed that subconsciously I have been mending something, and I would like to translate it into a work.

I started to do some painting after a lot of thinking about what I wanted to do. I decided to paint myself when I'm dancing naked in my new room. This moment of complete freedom and privacy represents the overall mood I have during this time of my life, after weeks of stress and crisis. I thought this moment of the day represented the mending that I have done.

First I sketched a painting on smaller paper A3 format paper. I really liked the colors and feeling of the painting. I wanted to do it in black and white as well to see what that would look like and if the colors really 'mattered'.

I also really liked the black and white version. But, I thought the colors were really important (as my pink couch is my favorite part of my room). I enjoyed the painting very much so I wanted to do some printing, maybe lino? But I'll leave that for when I'm finished with the painting.

For the final painting, I just started. I got in the mood by dancing naked in my room (obviously) and I took what I learnt during sketching and turned it into a very spontaneous painting :)

Why did I choose painting? I believe (figurative) painting is capturing a transient moment (/feeling) to make it last. It takes a split second and locks in into time. By painting it, you take your time for every millimeter of the moment, and you decide wether it's important or not and leave it, AND you can change it. By taking time to examine a specific moment in time (maybe more so than taking a photograph or video), you can really drown in it and discover the depths and importance of such a moment. When painting, you can change fragments of the moment for many different reasons; you can enlarge, snuggle away, exaggerate and romanticize. You can decide to add things, if it adds to the message. Painting can be thought out or (at the same time) spontaneous and is very changeable. It's open for interpretation for the painter and the spectator. It can be everything that you want it to be, every shape, colour and picture. I feel like what I can do with a brush, I can't when I take a picture or video.

And now.....


... the final result......



....drum roll please....

Some notes: I decided to make the painting very colorful and light. My room isn't as light as the painting makes it occur, but it definitely feels light. I feel light! By making the body a little big, I tried to still capture the smallness of my studio. By painting the bottom of my loft (where my bed is) I tried to illustrate the sense of security and comfort (geborgenheid) and implement some of the tent-like feeling I worked with in my previous work.

The pink couch and my plants and books are my favorite parts of my room. The mirror, I later noticed implies a certain reflection on the self, a very crucial part of my work which basically consists of reflecting on myself.

I even have been trying some lino cuts! It didn't really work as I wanted to, but it gave a fun simplified look to the image I made. And it created a big mess.