Casser Maison Project
I grew up in Ohio and after living in New England, California and New York City, came to live in Scotland in 1990. Like many people who migrate, ‘place’, ‘identity’, ‘home’ are not constants but shifting, transitory, even transferable. I have found that this is also the effect of time and growing older.
Casser Maison (breaking the house) refers to a French-Canadian end of life ritual carried out by elderly people when moving from the family home to a care environment. The process of giving away personal belongings to empty or ‘break’ the house is a form of sharing, a triage that becomes a re-imagining. What do these objects mean? What is their value? Who is the best caretaker of this thing? How will I be remembered through my objects? Can I fix my memory forward?
When home becomes movable; possessions are transferable. Could this shift, that many of us experience at the end of our lives, help us to imagine a more sustainable way to live on our planet? Could re-imagining our life with less things give us a clue to what will be necessary to save the planet for our future selves?
Casser Maison came directly from my life, which for the past few years has seen the breaking down and selling off of family homes as loved ones move on or die. It comes down to the dispersal of objects and places. And big questions. Where will I go now? What will happen to my things?
Artwork
Casser Maison (breaking the house)* is a bricolage of drawing, painting, and collecting that considers ideas of place, home and nostalgia as expressed through the rituals of breaking or leaving a house.
Of Quebecois extraction myself and, in 2019, in the midst of helping my mom sell her house in New England, I became fascinated by the term. The fact that my family was ‘breaking the house’ became very real as we dismantled the home my parents had lived in for 30 years. Having moved to Scotland in the 90’s their house was my last physical connection to the USA. I started to think about how we preserve a sense of ‘home’ even when that home disappears.
As an artist I often find my creative bearings by working outdoors – in French ‘en plein air’ and over years I have begun to feel I have a creative ‘home’ in the landscape. I began to wonder how this part of my creative practice might present answers to the painful yet necessary process of Casser Maison.
MUSEUM OF LOSS AND RENEWAL RESIDENCY In October 2019 I was selected for a Prendendo Tempo residency at The Museum of Loss and Renewal created and run by artists Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen in Collemacchia, Italy to develop Casser Maison and for three weeks I worked outdoors in the mountains of Molise. The paintings and drawings in this section were all created on location in the outdoor studio I set up behind the village of Collemacchia. One particular object summed up the process of Casser Maison for me. It was a clay memory box or ‘aedicula’, which I created from collected materials and local clay. A memento of time spent in Collemacchia, when I returned to Scotland. I left it behind in my outdoor studio. Here it slowly dissolved in the autumn rain. Tracy documented its disintegration sending me photos until it finally disappeared.
[*I first came across the term Casser Maison in a paper by Jean-Sébastien Marcoux (no relation) The ‘Casser Maison’ Ritual: Constructing the Self by Emptying the Home]
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