Essay by Luke Foster
“I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
When I was at art school in the nineties my sculpture lecturers told us all to read the French philosophers: Gaston Bachelard’s: The Poetics of Space as sculpture isn’t just about objects and stuff but as much the space around and between stuff.
The importance of having a secure space for an artist doesn’t become apparent until one moves house and is up rooted and moved to a new space.
I have just moved to my own tiny apartment in a small beach side town opposite the beach and just got my first two-hour beach walk in today.
I used to live ten minutes from the beach in a studio apartment and now about one minute from the beach in a one-bedroom apartment.
“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
It’s in my dreams at night time that I relive memories nightly of former homes and particularly my childhood home.
I chose this current apartment due to the proximity to the beach for my daily beach walks and its nice wooden floor boards and sunny light feeling.
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
Albert Einstein
In conclusion all people need a secure home to live and particularly artists and writers who need a secure abode to dream new ideas while lucid and awake.
