What is REALM: Amending Home?
Interviews with artists about living creatively, resourcefully & intentionally at home.
Part letter, part interview, part photo essay, REALM: Amending Home is a free, subscription-based monthly 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.
Each issue will feature 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.
Some questions I want to keep in mind: How do we know when to relocate, or when it’s time to ditch vague restlessness for the rootedness of belonging where we already live? 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 its 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 routine into meaningful ritual. 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.
I’ll release my first issue in early January, featuring the artist and rare map librarian Emily Prince. We’ll talk about living on stolen land; renting, relishing, and leaving a one-room studio in a Northern California coastal hamlet; how to fill space with space, not stuff; Kintsugi, the Japanese art of ceramic repair, and what it means to indulge in the aleatory.
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