218 Grove

What happens when one has access to a home? What is a home worth?

For my neighbors in Chicago, like many across America, one of their top concerns is affordable housing. Reflecting on the value of a home beyond a place of shelter, and apart of Cassim Shepard's Storytelling as / in / for Citymaking course, I spent sixteen weeks researching 218 Grove Street in Bluffton, Ohio. This house was my mother’s childhood home and the place where my grandparents lived. My aim was to better understand where the value I place on the concept of home comes from and to use this lens to explore how culture, material knowledge and identity is passed down from generation to generation.

In the installation of this work, viewers were invite to arrange the stencils made of Amish quilt motifs (my grandmother was an Amish quilter) in the grooves of the table top. On the back of some pieces, one would find quotes, stories, and poems collected from my research. Viewers were encouraged to play, discover, reflect and learn as they interacted with the work.

In the middle of my grandmother’s dining room and in the home my mother grew up in Bluffton, Ohio, was a slab table made of maple wood. It was the table where we all gathered, prayed, and ate our meals. For a younger few, it was a coveted spot under which to hide and play for hours on end. Before it found its home in my grandmother’s living room, the table was housed in a barn on the family farm where my grandmother grew up. In the barn, it served as a butcher’s table not only for my grandmother’s family, but for the neighbors as well. It was communal; it was shared. Her family members gently mocked her desire to take it home, asking “What was Sally going to do with the old butcher’s table from the barn?”

She repurposed it, coated it, and made it her own. She made it for us. The deep cuts in the wood from the butcher’s blade pattern the table and serve as a reminder of where she came from and, simply, of home. She used it to gather her family around her, from her eldest child to her youngest grandchild, all twenty-six of us. She used it to make her house a home.

A part of the final installation I created a triptic of images that gave further visual context to the story being shared.

A snapshot of the table at the end of the installation.

An example of the oral accounts, poems, letters, and emails I collected on the back of the final paper quilt layer.

Paper in the middle of being engraved and cut.

218 Grove

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