Sam Rogers

Home

Stories After Dark — Dark Mofo (2023)
One-night install at the Tasmanian State Library & Archives Building

A sense of home is both a universal, and intensely personal experience that characterises human life. 

What makes something home? Is it the physical space, filled with your belongings, a place to feel safe and make memories? Is it the people in your life – your partner, family, friends? Is home a place to retreat to within your mind, where you can explore ideas, and be your true self?

The subject of home often brings up a multitude of emotions and musings. Nuance and complexity always frame our experiences. My sense of home has become distorted over the past few years, through ever-changing plans and circumstances. As a result, I’ve moved around a lot, and found it hard to settle – both in the physical place and with the familiar and new faces around me. 

Those frequent relocations have taught me that I care less for my address. Provided I am safe, home is a place where I have the opportunity to do the things I enjoy, and be around those that I love. This can range from the simple things, like the espresso machine on my kitchen counter, to those more meaningful, such as sharing the current four walls with my partner.

I wanted my work to hold a mirror up to these thoughts. When being taught music theory, we’re often given the analogy of the tonic of a given key or tonal centre is “home”. This note feels safe, unmoving, resolute. Returning home in this context is given greater weight when tension, or “travelling away” precedes it. 

I wanted this piece to not have a definitive “home”, and constantly shift and move between key centres, exploring different timbres, musical shades and textures. The piece ends in a similar way to how it started, reminding me that although I may find myself in familiar territory, to expect and accept that things change, and home – whatever that is, in all its complexity – is lumped in with that. 

I feel like this period in my life is about travelling away from my tonal centre, as it were. I’m looking for new experiences, to meet new people – and undoubtedly I’ll find plenty of tension along the way. However, I can look at these future, unmet and possibly hypothetical problems with cautious optimism, as it means when I do find a more complete picture of home again, it will land with so much gravity that I’ll know exactly where I am. 

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The archives as part of Libraries Tasmania contain a plethora of Tasmanian house, design plans, and technical drawings that resonated with the sentiments in this work. House plans are simple documents that form real world structures and shape our sense of home and belonging.