At home in Sausalito, California with Lauren McKeon and Will Rogan
"Mutual respect and an escape hatch are key." -Lauren McKeon
Good morning.
This month REALM features artists Will Rogan and Lauren McKeon, who live on a teensy boat in the historical marina of Sausalito, a town north of San Francisco with a history of bohemian boat-dwellers. The boat is precarious, laden with a hundred years of history at sea and not originally built for domesticity. Privacy is near-impossible in a place with a footprint this small, yet an immense expansiveness is offered by the water and sky, like a tonic.
When the pandemic began, Lauren began filming her immediate surroundings every day on her phone, as if spying on her own life. These recordings resulted in dozens of short videos which Lauren edited and posted daily, like a mantra of sorts. Choppily edited, energetic and integrated with music, the videos each sketched a portrait of her home, isolation, partnership and restlessness—both brazen and tender. Watching them, I often felt like a pressure valve was releasing, as if the pandemic chaos was cathartically being felt for all of us.
When I first met Lauren’s partner Will he was guest teaching at CCA where I was I studying art and film, some seventeen years ago. I was drawn to Will’s stark, ordinary-yet-uncanny photographs, videos and sculptures which often commingled banal manmade and overlooked natural materials in unexpectedly poetic and beautiful ways. His projects to this day are often related to time—its compression, fragmentation, looping possibilities and expansiveness. Most recently, I love his tiny clocks made into pins for your lapel—anti-pocketwatches of sorts—which remind you of, but won’t tell you, the time. I wondered how the artistic aesthetics and attitudes of Will and Lauren would mingle and manifest in their home, so right before they moved to Vermont, leaving their tiny boat behind, I visited them to discuss and photograph their unique abode.
Hello! You’re both artists with very different practices. Will’s work is quiet and deadpan while yours, Lauren, is vivacious and vulnerable, like riding a renegade rollercoaster. I’m curious how your aesthetics overlap at home. How would you describe your home-aesthetic in 3 words?
Mini, messy, material-focused.
Tell me about your houseboat’s origin story.
Our boat was built in the Netherlands in 1921. We have heard different stories of her past life in European canals: pushing boats and hauling coke. She’s been through so much shit, wars, history, patched bullet holes even! That’s part of what we love about this little tank of a home.
What are the most beloved aspects of your home?
That our home is capable of untying and driving away. That it was built for a different purpose other than housing humans. That we have to adapt to her weird shapes, materials, and systems, and learn about history in order to know how to deal with and take care of her.
Are any of your personal philosophies reflected within your home?
Yes. Proximity to nature brings so much value to our everyday experience of our home. In our maritime community the sunsets stop us; weird life-forms in the water draw us toward one another; birds thunder into the marina; neighbors are seen on top of their boats sharing in the awe. We saw a seal born on the way to school one day!
We’re attached and attracted to objects made with care. We’re into repurposing the things around us. Wabi-Sabi, an acceptance of transience and imperfection, comes with the territory. Our home is always in motion. Forces of nature are always upon us. Accepting outside forces, knowing they will change and are completely out of control, draws out a kind of acceptance and surrender. We’re drawn to people living on the edge of center: this is where we find outsiders and feel most comfortable.
When you first moved onto your boat, did other houseboat dwellers offer words of wisdom or warning, and how did those sentiments hold up or play out?
This is a funny question because on the water everyone has an opinion, every opinion is different, and everyone is an expert. So yes, wisdom and warning was given. The best words of wisdom we got from anyone was this: always look at the boat of the person who is offering you their wisdom.
What object in your home has energetic or talisman-like properties?
A ceramic sculpture of our late dog Lady. It’s a shallow planter, that never grew much, but in tending to the dying plants we think of her often.
Lauren, in your daily one-minute videos, there is an electric energy running through the editing, movements, landscapes, and even you. You dance in them like a current. I’m curious if the place you live in aids to calm you or build up your energy?
My inside living space is only nine by twenty feet. Part of living on a boat is being outside all the time. Living on the water can feel quite expansive, even though we are afloat in a tiny vessel. At the beginning of Covid, my hummingbird energy was building because we stayed inside so much. Making videos became a way to get to my studio without actually going there, and to communicate with people about the weird times, without being together. It is mostly calming to live on the water.
Do you have any nicknames for your home?
Our first houseboat was named The Palace of Hard Rock: she was ferro cement. The second was named Chrysalis but we called her The Soggy Raisin. Our current boat is named Vreyheyt 2 which translates to Freedom 2 in Afrikaners, but on Coast Guard documents she is called Sunset Club.
What do you think homes of the future will be like?
On the moon; rich people only.
Will, tell me about something in your home that you tend to, and want to remain part of your daily life for as long as possible.
We have a little steel stool that was on our first boat when we bought it. It’s old, rusty, and beat up. Lauren made a sweet black cushion that’s too thick for the size, thus it slumps over the edge and needs constant resetting. There is something funny about that cushion: too tall, it reminds me of a Russian fur hat.
Do you have any non-negotiable rules at home?
No zippers or snaps in the bed. And don’t let her sink.
How does the micro-region, this houseboat community where you live, affect your creative practice?
Deeply, and in ways that I am sure that we don’t fully know yet. It's very immersive, the visual vernacular of a marina. Specifically, the marina where we live is its own language. We are the kind of artists who are highly affected by our day-to-day lives; our work grows from our behavior.
What’s the slowest thing you do at home?
Fix stuff.
How do you two cohabitate gracefully in an extremely compact living space? You always seem freshly in love, and I’d have drowned my partner by now if we lived on a teensy boat!
We are good at being close, it’s something that we have always been good at. That said, we also get off the boat and we have separate studios off the boat to work in, to escape to, to be alone. There is no slamming doors or leaving rooms. We hash it all out in the open. Our neighbors hear us laugh which means they also hear us yell. We are in close proximity to one another but also to our entire community; it’s part of why we’re all so close at Galilee. Mutual respect and an escape hatch are key.
Describe your home in 5 phrases.
Classy tank, historical, steel, floating, Freedom 2.
Describe your dream home in 5 phrases.
Rural, handmade, timber frame, dance deck, off-grid.
Peruse more of Will’s work here. Watch Lauren’s daily 1-minute videos (scroll back to Spring 2020) here.
Delving Deeper: Ebb and Flow
Many seek consistency and rootedness in a home. We often say that being at home is grounding and we extend that earthly metaphor to even mean our energetic sense of rootedness, safety, nesting. For some, however, a home that offers ebb and flow, elemental variation and a relationship completely off the land, on water in fact, is more fetching than a home that sits on a singularly located foundation.
I grew up on an island in the Pacific Northwest where boats and boat-dwellers were part of everyday life. In my twenties I’d stay for as-long-as-possible stints on my friend Lieta’s houseboat. In the mornings I’d marvel at the undulating ribbons of reflected sunlight ricocheting across every surface, hypnotized. The fluctuating splendors of weather, water and natural light was satisfying in an otherworldly sort of way, and offered something traditional, foundation-based architecture couldn’t: a genuine commingling and sensitivity—an ebb and flow with—the natural world.
Making home on a dense boat which is itself densely moored just feet apart from other homes limits possessions while increasing neighborly connection. After living in the same flat in San Francisco for a decade I still don’t know any of my neighbors by name, even the ones I share walls with, excluding my downstairs landlady, who gets my rent. Ask anyone living in a marina, however: they know just which neighbor is happy to watch their plants, feed their dog, loan a tool and lend a hand. Are there other types of homes that also offer this kind of genuine intimacy with both the natural world and the neighbors?
Consider home…
a place of interiority and privacy, but also a place to connect to your neighbors, rather than a place to avoid them. (I’m still learning this. My boyfriend urges me to give the fluctuating cast of twenty-somethings playing Nintendo Wii on our ceiling a kinder glance occasionally). Consider the cultural history and architectural and cultural underpinnnings of your home (be it building, boat or broader town). Ask your landlord, realtor or elderly neighbor what they might know about your home, and theirs. Affection blooms with details, context, and narratives authenticated with multiple voices. Appreciating your home-zone is not solely about appreciating its style, location and square footage but about knowing its history. When was it built, and for whom? What was there before it in the same space? What has it survived, and how has it been altered? How inventive or typical of the region is its architecture and floor plan? Who lived in your home before you did?
The secret histories of things, places and people move me. This month, my recommendations explore the secret histories of oft-overlooked subjects:
I’ve been digging into Secret Sound, a fantastic podcast by Matt Marble. Each episode of Secret Sound focuses on a marginalized American musician and features an array of enigmatic mystical traditions, folk history, philosophy and esoteric spiritualism. I recommend episode #37 about Merceditas Valdes as well as episode #9 and #20. The production is rich with rare, archival recordings. Each episode is like the coolest college class you never had (unless you studied musicology, esoteric spiritualism over the past few hundred years, and eccentric artist biographies).
If you’ve not seen the film Cold War, by the Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, it’s a stand out from the past few years and easy to stream. Like Secret Sound, it features incredibly enigmatic music and eccentric protagonists. It’s also based on a true story (in this case, the love story of the filmmaker’s parents, a traveling music troop and the shattering of Europe during the Cold War). Shimmering in inky black and white film stock, it’s as lush and lyrical as it is brutal and stark. Critics called it near-perfect. I couldn’t agree more.
In our interview, Lauren spoke of her values of transience and imperfection, how she and Will prefer being ‘edge of center’ and how they relish repurposed objects. This resonated with me as I often think about things with circular, not linear, existences. The podcast Circular highlights designs and objects and makers curious about the circular life of things as well. It features conversations with artists and designers whose creations decentralize the mainstream model of linear production and consumption and instead reinvent things out of already existing materials, particularly those considered waste materials. The host, Katie Treggiden is on a mission and I want a ticket to where she’s going.
Etymology interlude:
Hash it out (phrase): to discuss something thoroughly until an agreement is reached.
Hash is derived from the Old French verb hacher, meaning “to chop,” based on the French word for “axe” — hache.
By 1822, hash was even being used in English to describe a kind of cooked, well-chopped meal. By the 1950’s “hash-house” was used as slang to mean local diner.
Eventually, the phrase “hash it out” out came into use. But how?
It seems a link was eventually established between a public place to eat, and the type of discussion that often occurred there. There are at least a handful of cooking/eating/digesting-specific verbs used in reference to ideas and communication: “Don’t mince my words, dear” and “I’ll be chewing on that idea for a long time…” and the gracious “Let me digest what you just told me before I respond.”
The history of “hash it out” is a bit sloppy, like a hastily chopped pile of hash browns, but I love the link between intense discussion and eating in company. Ideas, too, need to be digested.
Don’t forget to slow down, eat together, and hash out whatever’s bothering you. I know there’s a lot on your plate.
Until next time,
Airyka
