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SATURDAY EVENING POST
September 19th, 2026
By Diamond Kyle
Written with time, thought, and a human pulse.
Few expressions are as ordinary as going home, most of the time we say it without thinking. We leave work and go home. We return from a journey and are relieved to be home. A student living elsewhere goes home for the holidays and means the house where their parents still live. Someone who has immigrated decades earlier may speak of going home and mean a country on another continent, then return to Vancouver and say, with equal conviction, that they are finally home.
The word seems capable of contradicting itself. We can have more than one home. We can lose a home without losing the building. We can return to a house and discover that home is no longer there. Sometimes the place we most persistently call home is somewhere to which we can never return.
A house is easier to define, it has walls, doors, an address, perhaps an owner. Home belongs to a more elusive category of human experience. It is both physical and psychological at once. A house becomes a home that we call ours because life has accumulated inside it: the placement of a bed, the peculiar darkness of a stairwell, the way afternoon light reaches the carpet where the dog lies, the sound of someone moving in the adjacent room. Long after we have forgotten the actuality of a house, these fragments can remain astonishingly precise and follows us our entire life.
French philosopher Gaston Bachelard made the intimate house one of the central subjects of The Poetics of Space. Attics, cellars, cupboards, corners, drawers and rooms are important because imagination has inhabited them. The house becomes a structure through which memory arranges itself, an architecture held internally as much as externally. Chinese-born America geographer and writer Yi Fu Tuan approached place from another direction, asking how repeated experience transforms undifferentiated space into somewhere to which we become attached. His thinking moves naturally from the intimacy of home outward toward neighbourhood and nation, suggesting that belonging is created through the long accumulation of experience rather than contained automatically within geography.
Perhaps this is why the childhood home possesses such disproportionate force. For a child, home is initially less a property than the extent of the known world. Its dimensions are understood through their bodily experience before they are understood abstractly. A table is encountered at another height; the distance between a bedroom and the reassuring presence of adults may seem enormous; the garden has boundaries beyond which the outside world begins. Years later we can return and be startled by how small everything really was, or was it?
Memory, however, is a poor surveyor, as we do not preserve childhood houses evenly. Certain rooms remain almost painfully vivid while others vanish entirely. We remember the pattern of a curtain and forget the shape of the room, remember the view from one window and cannot recall what stood beneath it. With time the remembered house separates from the house that once existed.
Artist Svetlana Boym wrote beautifully about nostalgia as something more complicated than a wish to reconstruct the past. Her distinction between restorative nostalgia, which attempts to recover a lost home as though it could be made whole again, and reflective nostalgia, which remains conscious of distance, contradiction and irretrievability. Perhaps the home for which we become nostalgic is inevitably partly imaginary. We do not long merely for architecture, we really long for a former relationship between ourselves and the world.
Rachel Whiteread's House, made in East London in 1993, gives extraordinary tangible form to this relationship between architecture and absence. Whiteread cast the interior of the last surviving Victorian terrace house on a street undergoing demolition. Once the exterior shell had been removed, the empty volume in which domestic life had occurred became solid. Fireplaces bulged outward; windows became sealed impressions; doorways could no longer be crossed. What had been inhabitable space became inaccessible matter. The sculpture survived for only a few months before it too was demolished.
Home is often imagined as refuge, but refuge is sometimes confining. Louise Bourgeois returned repeatedly to the ambiguity of domestic architecture. In the Femme Maison series, the female body is fused with, concealed by, and seemingly imprisoned within the house. The structure can be read as protection and enclosure simultaneously. The psychological power of home lies partly in this doubleness, the place intended to shelter us is also the place in which we are most exposed to intimacy, dependence, conflict and memory.
Doris Salcedo makes this vulnerability political. Her La Casa Viuda works of the early 1990s emerged from encounters with Colombians displaced by violence. Doors, furniture, clothing and even fragments of bone are brought together into objects that can no longer perform their domestic functions. The title refers to the idea of the "widowed house," a home bereft of those who once inhabited it. Here the destruction of home does not necessarily mean the disappearance of the architecture, the ordinary life of objects can become its own form of grief.
We begin life largely inside worlds assembled by other people and eventually find ourselves constructing them. If children inhabit these spaces, adults may discover only much later that they were constructing someone else's childhood home while simply getting on with the business of living. The chair nobody thought important, the tree outside a window, the table around which innumerable unremarkable dinners occurred can acquire an emotional permanence no one intended.
We cannot manufacture another person's nostalgia, nor can we know which ordinary things will become sacred in retrospect. This is perhaps one of the quieter responsibilities contained within the making of a home. Leaving a home introduces another problem. What does it mean to go home once there is more than one place capable of being home? For immigrants, exiles and those whose families have been displaced, home can become geographically divided. The place left behind need not cease being home for the new one to become genuine. Language, food, weather, music, family customs and even gestures become portable fragments of place.
Zarina's Home Is a Foreign Place from 1999 precisely describes this condition. The work comprises thirty-six woodcuts, each pairing a spare abstract image with an Urdu word connected to place, time, weather or memory. Its opening image recalls the plan of her childhood home in Aligarh, while ghar, written beneath it, carries the meanings of both house and home. Zarina's life had been marked by Partition, migration and repeated movement between countries, and she described language itself as a means through which the lost home could be revisited. The title contains the contradiction at the centre of the immigrant experience. Home can become foreign. The foreign can become home.
Do Ho Suh gives architectural form to something similar. His translucent fabric reconstructions of former homes preserve dimensions, doors, corridors and structural details while making apparently permanent architecture foldable and transportable. Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home/L.A. Home began with his childhood house in Seoul, recreated in silk after he had moved away; each subsequent exhibition location entered the title, so that the work itself acquired a migratory history. For him, architecture can travel, but the life that once made the architecture home cannot be packed and unfolded with it.
The idea of what a home is expands indefinitely as we get older and sometimes migrate, and we begin to speak of hometown, homeland, home country. A national home is stranger than a childhood home because it must be shared with people we will never know, people whose histories, languages and understanding of the country may differ profoundly from our own. Yet the emotional vocabulary remains strangely domestic. We speak of belonging, inheritance, protection, loss. A nation acquires landscapes and stories through which its citizens learn to recognise it, and it also acquires arguments about who has been included in those stories.
For Canadians, that question has become suddenly very relevant. The current political relationship between Canada and the United States has made questions of sovereignty, strategic autonomy and national decision making much more visible than they have in the past. This week, the Canadian government was publicly pursuing closer European economic and defence relationships while stressing Canada's right to determine its own international partnerships amid tensions with the United States. Sovereignty concerns whether a people retain meaningful authority over the political future of the place they call home. This lends a different gravity to the idea of Canadian identity. To regard Canada as home involves affection, and a certain amount of conviction and responsibility. Home carries responsibility precisely because it is inherited and temporary, we occupy it for a period and eventually pass it onward.
Canadian artists have participated in constructing the country's visual imagination for more than a century. Tom Thomson's The Jack Pine, painted in 1916–17, has become one of the canonical images through which a particular idea of Canada is recognised: water, rock, northern vegetation, vastness, distance. Such landscapes helped transform geography into national imagery, but their apparent emptiness also carried assumptions about whose presence counted within the representation of the land.
Jin me Yoon's Souvenirs of the Self shifts this question. Posing within the familiar tourist landscapes of Banff and Lake Louise, Yoon inserts her own body into images already coded as recognisably Canadian. The work exposes assumptions about who could historically appear to belong naturally within the national landscape. As an immigrant, this produces another version of the question: when does the place one arrived in become the place one is from? There may be no moment at which this transition can be identified. It occurs through accumulation. Years pass, children grow, friendships deepen, people die. Eventually the landscape through which one once moved as a newcomer contains one's own inevitable history.
Indigenous relationships to land make any easy equivalence between homeland and nation-state impossible. The political entity called Canada is recent beside Indigenous relationships to these territories, and Canadian landscape painting has often been criticised for presenting inhabited land as wilderness. Kent Monkman's Jack Pine of 2001 directly revisits Thomson's famous painting, overlaying its national landscape with figures and language that expose colonial histories and the mythology of empty land. The two works placed beside one another make the larger issue visible: the same landscape can contain radically different histories of belonging. The question "What is our home?" therefore cannot be separated from "Whose home has it been?" Those questions do not cancel one another. They deepen the responsibility contained within belonging.
Perhaps the distinction between possession and belonging is important, we speak easily of my home and our home, although the possessive is never completely adequate. Houses usually outlive individual occupants. Landscapes exceed those who claim them. Countries pass through generations of people who inherit them temporarily and leave them altered. To belong somewhere may therefore involve less possession than recognition: an understanding that a place has shaped us, that other lives are implicated in it, and that our own occupation of it carries consequences.
Which returns us to that deceptively simple phrase: going home.
A recent conversation with my mother Mian was one of the reasons I returned to the subject of home. She too, has been writing lately, privately, taking pleasure in the memory and small things in life and art. I asked if she would write about the Cultural Revolution, which she lived through as a teenager, there is too much ugliness there, she says, too much she does not wish to summon through writing. Perhaps one day, but not now.
She wrote recently about early memories of her home. In the courtyard of her childhood home in Beijing stood enormous pots of lotus. After the summer rain, water gathered in the broad green leaves, each one holding a shallow, trembling pool. It would collect there quietly until the weight became too much; then a leaf would tip, all at once, and pour its water onto a lotus blooming beneath it. She remembered watching the sudden fall of water strike the flower, loosening its petals one by one. They slipped away and came to rest on the surface below, still fresh and pink, floating like little boats. With each fallen petal the flower opened differently to the eye, until at last, its yellow stamens were left exposed at the centre, delicate and rain wet.
The lotus followed my mother through much of her early and middle career as a painter. Repeatedly, she returned to broken lotus leaves and flowers that were opening, slightly fading, missing petals, alive and already changing. Their beauty seemed to reside partly in their imperfection, in the evidence that something had happened and that they remained beautiful, nonetheless.
This, perhaps, is one of the quieter ways in which home forms us. Not through a grand sequence of defining events, but through ordinary and almost invisible encounters. Years later these things may reappear in taste, in judgement, in the subjects we return to, in our understanding of beauty, damage, success, failure, restraint, excess. For an artist, they may become part of the visual language through which an entire life is examined.
To belong in a home is to be vulnerable. To make a home is to give a place, and often the people within it, the power to shape us. What is beautiful there may remain with us for the rest of our lives, so may what is painful. Perhaps that is one of the things home teaches us: that beauty is not the absence of damage, and that what is fragile is often precisely what remains.
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