I created this project in 2020, when I found myself struggling with profound creative block during the onset of the pandemic. The reflective space of my studio made it hard to avoid feeling sadness and worry, and I found myself shutting down and unable to paint.
With school in limbo, my daughter was a little adrift, so we decided to renovate an old dollhouse we had once bought off of Craigs List as a project.
We decided we would use only what we had on hand for renovating and furnishing it. (And while I did have a box full of vintage miniatures, a lot of pieces needed repair.). Mostly we improvised—packing material and wood and fabric scraps became a chair; layers of paint transformed thick paper into floor tiles; and a bottle cap and a broken earring found new life as a sparkly chandelier.
After my daughter was busy with online school, I kept working, finding peace in the process of using whatever I had on hand to re-create the world in miniature. I broke our rule a few times, buying wood edge banding to make hardwood floors and a couple of special things off of Etsy, but mostly I stuck with it.
As I worked on this unexpected project, I began to make objects to connected to pandemic experiences: Clorox wipes and a bag of flour (for cleaning groceries and baking bread), Amazon packages at the front door, a mask-sewing station, jigsaw puzzles (a surprising pandemic trend), and a desk with a laptop for working from home.
Even though working on the house had become my safe place, I couldn’t ignore what was happening in the world. Along with the growing devastation of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement had exploded after the death of George Floyd. I made reading materials to reference these events: in the living room, Trump’s COVID denial on the cover of The New Yorker, Time magazine’s Black Lives Matter issue, and The New York Times listing the COVID dead by name; and in the bedroom, a copy of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist on the nightstand.
A friend encouraged me to post photos on Instagram, and the project really struck a chord with people. They noticed and delighted in all of the details. As the dollhouse evolved, friends dropped off things they thought I could use, artists mailed me tiny artworks, and a poet I knew gave me the project title. Reflecting on how for many of us our homes had become places of refuge in scary and turbulent times, he offered up the words “where safety lives”.
