No Place Like Home - a series

No Place Like Home 1, and 2 are digital manipulations of a photograph of the first house I lived in from age 4 to 8, in a small town in Ontario, Canada with my parents and siblings. The text is a reference to Dorothy’s repeated refrain from the Wizard of Oz when she clicks her ruby red shoes and says, “there’s no place like home.” The house here is reminiscent of the trauma, fear and confusion that represented home for me as a child and for many others.

No Place Like Home 3 depicts the many rooms of the house, which did not provide safety, with the text representing the lack of security a child is made to feel when her love and trust is manipulated and abused.

All pieces were created using Photoshop.

And a side note: for many years, home meant nothing to me but fear until I was able to come to terms with my childhood and of not having the kind of home I had heard about from tv or in films. Not everyone does. “According to self-reported data from the 2014 General Social Survey on Victimization (GSS), one-third (33%) of Canadians aged 15 and older experienced some form of maltreatment during childhood. Child maltreatment includes physical and/or sexual abuse before the age of 15 by someone aged 18 or older, as well as witnessing violence by a parent or guardian against another adult.” https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/170216/dq170216b-eng.htm