Part letter, part interview, part photo essay, REALM is a free, subscription-based newsletter project founded by me, Airyka Rockefeller. I’m an artist and photographer with a lifelong obsession with home, both as a place and as an idea. Subscribers will receive issues the first Sunday of each month beginning in January 2021 for one year, and then sporadically, after from 2022 onward. Enjoy the first year of issues in the archive.


Each issue will feature original photographs, as well as an interview with an artist who inspires me. We’ll discuss aspects of home, both bodily and conceptual; beloved design features; bathing rituals; how to navigate waste and sustainability; how to elevate the mundane; how aesthetics are nurtured, not purchased; and how our values might better inform our home spaces, and vice versa. Also: how to choose the art and objects we live with, maximalism and minimalism, co-habitating gracefully, and what we’d take with us in a fire if the very concept of home as a physical place was at stake.

Fueled by curiosity about how artists live, by my love of architecture, interiors, and design, and by a fascination with home-routines large and small—cooking, sprucing, gathering, domestic partnerships, and working at home—REALM aims to gather an array of voices to speak to what is ever-more crucial in our shifting world: our need to respect limited resources, an appreciation of the domestic arts, and the slow, thoughtful, ultimately phenomenological experiences that we have, separately yet collectively, within the space we call home.

REALM’s focus is on the aspects and items of a home which compel meaning and pleasure while producing a minimal environmental impact. Despite my delight with the subject of interior design, forays into the field have often left me longing for a different analysis of what a home truly is and could be. What if homes, rooms, and our collections were composed with a sense of the longview, the heirloom rather than the replaceable object, and an intention to support and relish local makers and artists? What if the concept of slow food that has steadily revolutionized farming systems, our health, and culinary prowess, similarly impacted the design of our domestic realms as well?

Some questions I want to keep in mind: How do we cultivate our own home-style, rather than imitate prefabricated visions fed to us? What might be an alternative to interior design magazines that tell us the price-point of every covetable object on their pages only to leave us feeling lousy about what we supposedly lack? What are the cultural significances, ecological impacts, and aesthetic possibilities of tending to well-worn, handed-down, or heirloom things, be they a piece of furniture or a garment, in a world constantly stimulating us to purchase items anew? What art, rituals, practices, and domestic projects might inspire hopefulness, usefulness, and appreciation, not once, but again and again? What might the homes of the future be like, and what about the homes of the past should we carry forward?


I’ll occasionally dip into etymology, art, and cultural anthropology, and share stories from the realm of my own homes, past and present. I believe the domestic arts are living arts that connect us to place, enhance our relationship to physical materials, and make it possible to transform mundane routines into meaningful rituals. It is a privilege to have a home, first and foremost: one I think about daily. It is also a privilege to share with you some of the spaces and people who inspire me. There are so many—let’s get started.

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Subscribe to REALM: Amending Home

Home is a personal, physical and philosophical space. Via interviews and images, I’m asking creative people who inspire me how they select, collect, cohabitate and live consciously and artfully at home, now.

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A monthly newsletter sent the first Sunday of each month, featuring artist interviews & musings about living artfully, resourcefully & intentionally at home.