Mantelpiece

After reading “Dismantling Mantelpieces: Narrating Identities and Materializing Culture in the Home” byRachel Hurdley, I found it to be a good practice to reflect on my own mantel place and ask how I use the objects to perform certain aspects of my identity, what they may say outside of what I intend, and what effect their presence has on my daily life. Here is a segment from the exercise concerning the framed blueprint: The framed blueprint: This was also a gift from my sister that has a lot of sentimental value for me and I also really like the aesthetic of the aged blueprint. This is the blueprint of the house built by my great grandmother and grandfather. Growing up, I frequently stayed at the house while my great grandmother was alive and after she died my grandmother lived there. After my grandmother moved to a nursing home, my mother and siblings moved in while I was in college. We moved around a lot when I was growing up, so this is the closest thing to like a house home I can think of, I can still remember the smell. Eventually, a court case was lost and the bank took possession in an effort to pay some of the costs of grandma’s care or something to that effect. Before my mom moved out, she found a collection of blueprints from when the house was being built. 

If I look at this as a performance of identity in the way that “Dismantling Mantelpieces: Narrating Identities and Materializing Culture in the Home” does, I suppose the blueprint is a performance of my familiar roots and my duty to honor the maternal history of my family. If I were to apply Dr. Gosling’s approach from Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, I would categorize this piece as both “other-directed” and “self directed”. The blueprint is a lovely work of art, carefully framed and preserved, that is unique and expresses my interior design aesthetic, and a pension to display artifacts that have personal meaning to me. It is also a memorial for myself of a place that was once a home for me but is no longer, a snapshot from long ago of the process of planning and shaping a home, perhaps a reminder that I may also be able to establish a home for myself and my loved ones one day.

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