Home Is Where The Heart Is

This Friday, tomorrow night, is the HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS art auction to benefit the Athens area HABITAT FOR HUMANITY WOMEN BUILD. The art auction is being held at the LYNDON HOUSE ARTS CENTER here in Athens, from 6pm to 8pm and is open to the public. If you're in town, please please please stop by, look at some art, maybe bid on some art, and learn a bit about HABITAT FOR HUMANITY and their cause.

Missy and I (along with about 30 other local artists) are participating in the event. Each artist was given a wooden silhouette of a house to decorate based around the theme of "home is where the heart is". Last year's auction (which was also their very first auction) raised over $3000, and we're hoping to top that this year. We participated in last year's auction which was a lot of fun and we're looking forward to tomorrow night.

This is the house I decorated last year with felt:



And this is the house I decorated for tomorrow's auction. Once again, I wanted to use felt in some way:



I used these sliced up pieces of tree branches from our backyard. Last year, Missy's dad had cut up some fallen tree limbs into these sections. We had been saving them for some sort of project. I took some of those slices and hot glued them to the wood base. Afterwards, I made a little paper template that I used to cut these little house silhouettes out of stiff felt:







I punched hearts out of the middle of each felt house. Then, I carved out slits in some of the bigger wood slices that I could slip the houses into, after applying a bit of hot glue to the bottom edges:





Again, I used my heart-shaped hole punch, and punched out little red hearts from stiff felt, which I popped into the centers of each house. Then, I strung them all together with red thread. I used twigs to make miniature trees:







The piece is called "A Community Was Here Once Before"...now, here's where I get "deep like purple"...I used the house as a base rather than a canvas because I wanted to play around with the notion of the house or home being the foundation for community. The little white houses are actually "ghost houses", and they represent a community that was there once before but is actually no longer there for whatever reason (natural disaster, economic disaster, etc.). The little neighborhood is actually a ghost town. Maybe it's a neighborhood destroyed by fire or flood. Maybe it's a neighborhood that disintegrated because of foreclosure or maybe it was a neighborhood that was only half-way built. Maybe it's a neighborhood destroyed by economic hardship. Or gentrification. Also in the mix is the notion of an ecosystem being destroyed in order to make room for another ecosystem. Forests are cleared to make way for "land development"; trees are cut down to make the planks of wood that are used to build these houses - each house seems to emerge from each of their woody bases, as if they were carved out of the wood...

Anyways...come on out tomorrow night if you can and check out all the different ways these houses were decorated. Buy some unique art and support a worthy cause!