New Year, New Space

Our first floor renovation serves as a good physical reminder of all the worry, promise and hope I hold for the year. Though the room is nearly complete, still yet there are buckets of paint, stacks of wood, and miscellaneous tools standing resignedly shoulder to shoulder with walls just beginning to fortell upholstered chairs, cozy rugs, napping cats, and comfortable domestic disarray.

With all the hardest work done and the walls ready for decisions as to their final dressings, it is a surprisingly uncomfortable relationship I have with the empty space between them. I have courted its possibilities too long perhaps, envisioned them too precisely not to feel a disruption; I've made room for its haunts! The stories I've heard, the room's very public nature way before we ever knew it, have come to life now that life is back in the room.

The promise of renewed life in the big room is running paralell to my decision to rededicate myself to making art again. Stating this publicly is as bold a move as taking on a renovation - everyone can see whether it will move forward or not, there's no hiding the project one way or another. But I've decided to plug away at it again, take the chance that the vision I once held for my career might actually one day round its own corner out of rough construction.

The new year and the new space are both promising opportunities for growth; revisited, redesigned, rededicated.


PS - A future post might talk about how the public/private space issue is a recurring theme in my personal history, and why this might be.
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