I am roughly eleven years old when I first see Henry Moore’s Two-Piece Reclining Figure No.5 (1963–64) at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. I stand before it on a foggy grey morning and am in awe of how its bronze body effortlessly rests upon the horizon line, like a paperweight pinned between land and sea. I still remember how the smell of the sea breeze and freshly mown grass embalmed each figure in the landscape, folding them into a single moment in time.
Ten years later, for my twenty-first birthday, I drove to the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens in Hertfordshire, just outside of London. There, sheep graze on a pristine lawn beside the artist’s monumental sculptures. As I walk up a slight incline, I look toward Large Reclining Figure (1976), a work that I later learn was inspired by a smaller lead version sold to the Museum of Modern Art. Fearing the lead too fragile to cast from, Large Reclining Figure was instead molded from another similar piece held in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
I didn’t realize it then, but the interconnected encounters harbored within Moore’s Reclining Figures were shaping the scaffolding of a home within me. Gaston Bachelard writes “our house is our corner of the world,” a place that “shelters daydreaming [and] allows one to dream in peace.” He implores us to “undertake a topoanalysis of all the space that has invited us to come out of ourselves.” In a sense, that is what I strive to do with this essay, yet rather than tracing home through domestic space, I do so across museums. As I move between Paris, London, New York City, and Venice, my sense of belonging rests not exactly in a fixed place, but rather in a rhythm of familiar encounters with artworks and museums that I return to.
Home is a notion that one struggles to anchor within a single place. The word itself feels transient, scattered across multiple cultures and languages. I grew up in a small town just outside of Paris called Saint Germain en Laye. My mom is from St. Louis suburbia, and my dad was raised by a quintessentially French–Breton woman in Nashville, Tennessee. I studied at a school that was a fundamentally polyphonic place, where fourteen languages echoed throughout the hallways. I became attuned to the lull of Portuguese, the melody of Japanese, or even the staccato of Dutch, and would weave together fragments of words and script in my mind. I grew accustomed to that sense of linguistic fluidity, and it quickly stretched beyond to cultural institutions, places that, unlike at school or at home, I could entirely experience on my own.
In Paris, I began escaping from suburbia to the warm, vibrant halls of the Centre Georges Pompidou. I would walk through the brightly lit galleries, crouch inside Jean Dubuffet’s cavernous Le Jardin d’hiver (1968–1970), or wait in the basement cinema, catching whatever film was playing that afternoon, sinking into the worn velvet seats as the credits began to play. Around every corner I would discover something new, figures like Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nanasbursting with color and meaning that extended far beyond words, and Yves Klein’s IKB 3 (International Klein Blue), monochrome paintings that seemed to muffle the visitors’ footsteps like the portals to the “spiritual absolute” that the artist had intended them to be. Yet beyond being a site of immersive creative encounters, the Pompidou became my resting point between expeditions across the city’s winding streets. It became a place where I could linger and daydream, a reliable refuge in my teenage years.
It’s also in the Pompidou’s galleries that I first came across Sophie Calle’s Gotham Handbook (1994), a reproduction of which I would later buy and scrutinize as my own personal guide to living in New York City. As part of the artist’s attempts to acclimatize to the impersonal and loud streets of Manhattan, she transforms a phone booth into a place of rest, complete with flowers, orange juice, Carlton cigarettes, a copy of Time magazine, matches, and a comb. A passerby, moved by this intervention, left a note that read “home sweet home.” Hung nearby in the Pompidou’s galleries was Calle’s Suite Venitienne, detailing her pursuit of a man she had followed that day on the streets in Paris, and was later introduced to as Henri B. at a reception. Here, she learns of his imminent travels to Venice and, the very next day, jumps on a train from Gare de Lyon to Venezia Santa Lucia to follow him. My first encounters with Calle’s work became blueprints of my own sense of belonging, daydreams that materialized into real homes in both these cities.
Beyond Calle’s voyeuristic narrative inSuite Vénitienne, which borders on a kind of whimsical feminist situationism, the artist documents specific sites in the city, both through timed diary entries and black and white photographs. The work unfolds across fondamentas and calles, culminating when she is caught by Henri B. in Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo. There, her cover is blown: “in the center, an equestrian statue, in the back the civic hospital.”
Years after seeing Calle’s work at the Pompidou, I would move to Venice and walk past that statue many times on my way to work at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. I actually went to a doctor’s appointment inside the hospital, which was built in the 16th century, for an exam that was held in the medievalesque lower basement floor of the building. Later that morning, at around 8:30 a.m., I would walk across a quiet San Marco Square and laugh thinking back to Calle’s fateful encounter with Henri B., wondering if she ever had to descend those labyrinth halls or navigate the bureaucracy of the Ospedale Civile di Venezia.
A year prior to this it’s 2020, and I am living in London at the height of the pandemic. Here, I completed my bachelor’s degree and my master’s degree while living with a boyfriend in an apartment that I thought would be my home for much longer than it was. I spent a little under five years in that city. Through it all I ventured countless times across the belly of the Barbican, the Turbine Hall, or the Serpentine Gallery, meandering through the galleries and absorbing every possible detail of the exhibitions on view, as well as the idiosyncrasies of the buildings themselves.
In the winter that same year, we drive to the Tate Britain in our red cinquecento. We roll the roof down, layered in gloves, sweaters, ear warmers, hats, and scarves, and glide through the empty streets. I glance up at the holiday decorations on Piccadilly Circus as the LED angels’ flashing lights danced across the Apple Store and Microsoft. We’re drawn in by neon colors that illuminate the museum’s usually austere façade as we approach the Tate. A blue pupiled evil-eye hovers at the center of the building and casts a watchful gaze on the Thames River, as well as passing pedestrians. Blue and red garlands coil up the columns towards the roof, where the words Remembering a brave new world glimmer atop the building, alongside Love Shine Light and Aim Dream TRUTH. Other Hindu deities such as Ganesh, the god of prosperity, or Hanuman, the monkey god, animate the technicolor installation.
As I ascend the Tate’s steps, I am greeted by the murmur of voices, all gathered to see Chila Kumari Singh Burman’s Remembering a Brave New World (2020), a Tate commission that coincided with the celebration of Diwali, the Festival of Light. “It represents new beginnings,” I overhear, as visitors drink mulled wine and smoke cigarettes, bundled in winter coats. The artwork itself would take on a new unexpected message that year, one of bridging community following months of social isolation for so many.
Shortly after, my boyfriend of five years and I separated. Sara Ahmed writes, “After all, it is often loss that generates a new direction; when we lose a loved one, for instance, or when a relationship with a loved one ends, it is hard to simply stay on course because love is also what gives us a certain direction.” My sense of home felt uprooted; I packed all my belongings into twelve boxes and left them in storage as I figured out my next move.
I landed in Venice a few months later, where I began that job at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. I lived there for three months, and after a brief stint in New York City, returned full-time for another year and a half. It was here, on an island in the middle of the laguna, spilling with unexpected detours, that I became more secure in the notion of redirection. Change morphed into an opportunity rather than obstacle. Being knocked off course in a city of canals, dead ends, and sudden openings onto palazzos or lush camposwas not unlike the act of wandering through museum galleries where the sense of discovery, through my encounter with familiar artworks in unfamiliar places, became my anchor.
Every day on my lunch break at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, especially in the winter when there were fewer tourists; I’d spend a few minutes leaning against a window that overlooked the Grand Canal. Here, I’d gaze upon Pablo Picasso’s On the Beach (1937), and it felt like just me and the two anthropomorphic figures in the work. Together they gently cradle a toy boat, as another body cranes its head above the straight line of the sea, like stone resting a top solid ground. Reminiscent of Moore’s Reclining Figures, these bodies conjured a sculptural serenity, and it’s here, as soft ripples of the Grand Canal lapped against the Palazzo Venier di Leoni’s facades, that I find my footing once more.
I had also discovered a plaque along the Zattere that commemorated the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. It reads: “(1940-1996) grande poet russa, premio Nobel, amo e canto questo luogo”/ “Russian poet, Nobel Prize, loved and sang this place.” In his text Watermark, an ode to his winters spent in Venice, Brodsky mused, “If I get sidetracked, it is because being sidetracked is literally a matter of course here and echoes water. What lies ahead, in other words, may amount not to a story but to the flow of muddy water … The reason I am engaged in straining is that it contains reflections, among them my own. In Venice, to be led astray is to find your way anew, and I began to feel that my movements between cities, like Brodsky’sv re-elections in muddy canals, were just another kind of continuity.
Today, I am writing this from my apartment in the Lower East Side, where I have lived for three years, and where I work full-time at the Museum of Modern Art. The honking and ambulance alarms rise from the streets below me and I think here of Calle’s telephone box on the corner of Greenwich and Harrison in Manhattan. That’s about a 15-minute walk away from my current apartment, and maybe even less from the room with an air mattress that I crashed on when I first moved to the city. I tried to visit that phone box when I first moved to New York, almost like a pilgrimage to a place in which my daydreams had so long been anchored, but it had been removed decades ago. Although I didn’t get to see the telephone box itself, I still carry with me that impulse to claim a space, to make the city my own.
I don’t know when Moore’s Reclining Figure (1936) was last on view in MoMA’s galleries, but I think of it often, its curved body somewhere in the museum’s collection. The idea of it being nearby feels like a continuation of the rest and refuge I first felt decades ago in the garden of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. In the soft yellow light of the galleries, my breath deepens, my heartbeat slows. Once more I find myself daydreaming, in suspension, and ready for my next move.
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