RACHEL PHILLIPS

FIELD NOTES

Make me a willow cabin at your gate, and call upon my soul within the house.

Twelfth Night, Shakespeare

Certainly, home is a place.  It is also a place of mind.  For the spirit too, home offers familiarity and solace, shelter and rest.  Yet a house is not for hiding from the world; it has windows, and doors to enter but also leave by.  As a girl, I adored the Wind in the Willows where homes were in and of the landscape—built underground, along the riverbank, and in the woods.  A place where you can be still, letting the world come to you, watching birds fly by.

This series of photographs blends the domesticity of home with the joy of wilderness, the natural world.  The paper houses are built from letters, postcards and envelopes saved through the decades in old shoeboxes by my grandparents and discovered in their attic a few years ago.  The images are printed on old envelopes collected from around the world; artifacts from the last centuries.  What did the envelopes contain?  Where did they come from?  In whose mailbox were they delivered?  What stories do they tell?

SELFSAME

"selfsame" adj.  Being the very same; identical

 As an artist, there is the joy of discovery when looking for the first time at a picture I have made—after the camera's shutter has tripped, the film developed, the image printed—and seeing it is "right."

 Occasionally, this happens twice.  Pictures taken in different moments—sometimes separated only by inches and seconds, other times by months and thousands of miles—pair.