During the American Civil War, the song “Home! Sweet Home!” was popularized by wistful soldiers: “A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there, / Which, seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met with elsewhere.” The tune further launched a visual equivalent, the ubiquitous cross-stitch sampler hung in postwar parlors decreeing, “Home sweet home.” The handiworks are one of the formal antecedents of May Kytonen’s Making Home series.
Each of Kytonen’s boxes holds a delicately cut Chinese lattice screen, superimposed over a hand-embroidered floor plan from HGTV’s Dream Home. Like their predecessors, these domestic formulations are statements. Wherever they are displayed, their maker hallows a small patch of the world to operate as home. For Kytonen, the work specifically honors her bicultural status as both Taiwanese and American while simultaneously exploring the question, Where do I belong?
Creativity, whether song, sewing craft, or art, gives meaning to and assists the navigation of transient experiences instigated by wars, conflicts, and ensuing migrations and displacements. Religious persecution landed Prisca and Aquila in Corinth. This cross-cultural couple found the crossroad city amenable to their tent-making business and further provided artisan networking, subsequently cementing a relationship with the apostle Paul. Moreover, their artifacts, whether tent or awning, demarcated a home away from home. Perhaps this production of place informed their understanding of hospitality as sacred. For Prisca and Aquila, faith and handiworks coalesced to further the blossoming house church in Corinth and beyond. Can it be that our deepest longings for home manifest some “charm from the sky”? A fragment of heaven on earth whispering, Welcome, you are finally home.
Philosopher Gaston Bachelard identified the image of the house as embodying the human power to incorporate “thoughts, memories, and dreams.” Prisca and Aquila, alongside May Kytonen’s Making Home pieces, demonstrate the ways reconciling lostness incarnates foundness. Their crafting, the site of welcoming respite, dreams of the many rooms Jesus is preparing.
