DANA SHAVIN ARTIST
Drawn to Scale: House as Body, House as Unrequited Love
It has been said that when we dream of houses, we are dreaming of our body. I return to the theme of home--specifically, homes I have lived in or dreamed about repeatedly-- in my writing and my artwork: home as refuge, home as body, home as the dream I can't stop dreaming.
Writer/philosopher and art critic John Ruskin wrote, "Home is the place of peace; the shelter not only from all injury but from all terror, doubt and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, it ceases to be home, it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in."
Home, in other words, isn't just where the heart is; it is the heart itself, the private, pulsating soul of the human animal. What we choose to live in, how we live inside it, whether we love or hate or are indifferent to it, is a clue to our relationship with our self.
I work almost exclusively with salvaged materials: wood, tin, wire mesh, string, fabric, roofing shingle, and paint. Some of my house structures appear vacant and forgotten. Others appear crude, damaged, ill-conceived, or unstable. These “flaws” in my sculptures depict the state of my body and mind at the time I was living in and/or dreaming about them. Too, the process by which I build the structures—always halting, often frustrating, and frequently requiring minor to major tear-downs and rebuilds in order to suit my vision, as well as the very concept of “salvage” itself—is a mirror of my process, or journey, from anorexia nervosa to recovery.