Homebound (2020) is a series of 20 and running images taken at home in 2020 coupled along with hand-sewn doodles from my diary entries between 2003 and 2008 when I was 6 to 11 years old.

I spent most of my leisure time at home when I was a child, drawing by myself or with my sister. For a large part of my teenage years thereafter, home was strange and distant with hostilities unresolved – only dissipated with time and silence. Many of my waking hours after adolescence was spent away from it, and wanting to be away from it.

In the recent 2 years, my perception of home has expanded beyond my prior one-dimensional expectation – having always yearned for a space tailored for my maximum safety, ease and comfort. I’ve come to experience a reconfiguring and easing of tension within the four walls of family. Home is active and alive and very much subjected to ache and laughter – a cyclical sequence of clashing and reconciling, it goes back and forth. Perhaps it is the time and effort taken to tend and care and the small changes that occur with our inclusion in the family sphere that makes a home.

Homebound merges two life stages of excessive time spent at home – one from a time where I’d chirpily draw upon reflecting my day at home and the world around me and another from a time just recently during lockdown when my family and I had plenty of time to engage passively and actively with one another. It’s a reconciliation of my expectations then and the reality now, a closure to a then-turbulent chapter of family life.