Coming Home is a project that addresses the plurality of what we understand to be home. It explores the intersections of childhood memory, the realities of adulthood, and the physicality of home itself. My work examines the ways in which personal and collective memory define identity, gender, culture, and relationships.
Coming Home documents my experience of rediscovering home and revisiting childhood memory as an adult. This series of photographs investigates changes in scale from childhood to adulthood and discrepancies between youthful imagination, our expectations, and the physical and practical realities of maturity.
I have photographed three houses: my dollhouse, my playhouse, and the house I grew up in, the house I am living in now. These three edifices embody childhood memory, the passage of time, and the transference of roles from parent to child, and inversely, from child to parent. I examine ways in which visual ideas of identity and family relationships are the cornerstones of home, creating visual worlds that mirror the real world.
This selection of black-and-white photographs addresses identity, places, memory, real and imagined. In photographing the present, I am re-photographing and re-appropriating the past acknowledging a sense of time and longing. Coming Home invites the viewer to consider her/his own experiences by intertwining realms of intimacy and universality. – Catherine Wilmer






























