I can always come back home.

Part of The Comfort House Project: Stay as long as you like

This linocut reduction print features a fantasy room for Kiona, from which she can travel to visit her favourite places (more importantly, her favourite people). 

I met Kiona to interview her for this project at a park in our shared neighbourhood. We sat on the grass and talked about people and places that don't expect anything from you and allow you to just be. For her, that is unquestioningly her family's farm. She has a jar of soil and seeds at her home in the city that smells like the farm and brings her comfort. Kiona is an artist whose work is warm and intimate and often features members of her family and scenes from the farm. She told me about how she is always untangling the problems of representation vs extraction, storytelling without exposing people, and the difference between artist and archivist. She reminds herself that personal interpretation is not institutional misinterpretation. 

In the space I created for her, Kiona is drawing a stylized foliage (berry bushes, maybe?) that appears in many of her paintings. Behind her, the light of an autumn afternoon is coming through a big barn door. You can see trees and shrubs and a dirt path with the silhouette of her Moshom just beyond. The other windows and doors in this room seem to show different places: sunset on a lake and tall buildings steaming on a winter morning. From this magical studio, Kiona can be instantly transported between her home in the city and her home on the farm.