Home can be most precious to us when we are far away and can only visit it in our minds. So, what happens when home is somewhere we never leave? The familiar comforts and the corners we’ve curated become boring footnotes on repetitive days or reminders of the places we can no longer go. Home can become something we take for granted or even something we are frustrated by.

Reading Chair. By Andrews. Linocut on book page.

I remember a phrase going around social media in the early months of quarantine. While the general public was bemoaning the loss of activities and opportunities, feeling “stuck at home,” a countermovement arose to put being simply “at home” into perspective. Having a home at all, they argued, was a privilege, especially if you had space available to be used as offices and classrooms to keep your family safe and functional during a tumultuous time.

“Homebound,” by Indianapolis artists Lorie Lee Andrews and Kristin Schoonveld, explores the paradox that exists within difficulty and suffering. We have the need and desire to acknowledge the emotional impact of loss in one’s own life, while recognizing the ever-present fact that someone else has it worse— likely much worse. That tension is nothing short of one of life’s great lessons. Proper perspective is to acknowledge the validity of one’s personal experience while situating it alongside reality.

Summertime. By Schoonveld. Acrylic on canvas. 3’ x 4’

During a time of high eviction rates and unemployment, artist Lorie Lee Andrews said, “I hear myself complain...yet my gratitude for my home peaked during the pandemic when we knew people were losing their homes.” It’s an uncomfortable admission, but it’s one that lends itself to greater depth and complexity than a simplistic negative or positive position. The exhibit from Andrews and Schoonveld embodies this thematically as well as visually, with the artists using distinct mediums and styles of expression.

A House in an Expensive Neighborhood. By Andrews.

Andrews’s intricate level of detail invites us into a miniature neighborhood in which personalities take shape through three-dimensional house forms. Other personal moments become relatable experiences through mixed media and copper-plate etched illustrations. Though each house shares a cookie cutter resemblance to its neighbor, the collaged and painted external walls reveal the individualism we typically only see when invited inside their real life counterparts, with variation ranging from vibrant abstraction to caged crochet.

Andrews’s portion of “Homebound” grounds us in the forms and shapes we associate with home: walls and a roof, an armchair and a bed. Schoonveld’s acrylic approach is an untethered peek inside the emotional landscape that lies behind the door and the mind’s eye. Wildly geometric and abstract, her paintings on acrylic and wood are attached to titles that read like something jotted in a dream journal to explain hours of dizzyingly colorful thoughts.

Predictable. By Schoonveld. Acrylic on canvas. 30” x 40”

Spending time at home over the past year has led Schoonveld to the process of “finding patterns and a soothing rhythm inside” through her artistic practice. To her, home means “comfort and predictability.” Though the patterned routes may be known only to her, the erratic shapes and colors that are pinned into visible order seem like a snapshot offered us of something much larger, whose lines and arcs would go on ad infinitum.

The exhibit is a welcome mental exercise in the concept and experience of what it means to be at home. Homebound will be on display in the Harrison Center’s Underground Gallery for the months of May and June. All pieces are available for purchase in our online gallery and can be viewed by appointment at any time during May or June.