‘The 100 Houses Project: Reflections on Our Times’ Exhibition Opening for Mo Hamilton Artist

The image of home is a powerful, archetypal symbol for finding our truest self, or soul. We all have this profound longing to find home, a place of deep belonging. To come home is to find a place where you can truly be yourself and to be home is to have a refuge from all the outward expectations and be in a place where you can listen to your own heart. When we are in touch with our inner selves home can be wherever we are at that time.

The 100 Houses Project that I am working on is a long-term project that began with the question “What is home?”. The idea for this project started with a profound dream I had when my family and I were leaving a home that we had lived in for ten years. This was a place where I had given birth to both of my children and where my husband and I grew from being a couple to becoming a family. Unfortunately, it wasn’t economically viable for us to stay so we chose to leave because my husband got a steady job up north. I had packed all of our belongings into a moving van and we had our last sleep in our empty house. That night I had a dream that I was living in a house on a bridge. I thought the dream was such a profound visual metaphor for what I was experiencing in that moment because I was no longer staying in this home but I wasn’t at my new place either. I was in that in-between place. This got me thinking of the home as symbol for the soul and how the only steadiness we have is our inner strength. In The 100 Houses Project I use the symbol of the house as a way of expressing the steadiness of our inner homes or selves as we head out on our life’s journey.

Artist Statement
As an artist, I obtain my inspiration from the external world around me, but reveal in my paintings the internal world of my imagination. By reducing my images to their essential elements, I can bring simplicity, myth, and the primal, to my explorations of limits and boundaries with the intent of moving beyond them. Recently, I have worked on a series of paintings that explore the soul’s journey. I have followed my vision to places I had not intended to go allowing my intuition to guide me. I have found power in words and incorporated them in my work; I have used collage and montage to go places I had not been before. I use life story as the dark, rich compost to generate new creation and have in my most recent paintings worked more intuitively than ever before.