Flyover Country

2016

8’ X 8’ X 8’

Plaster, plywood, photos, glass, found bone, cottonwood leaves, water

A collaborative work with my father, Pete Froelich, and mother, Deidre Busacca.

Growing up in the Dakotas, all I could think of was getting out. The land seemed empty and plain, the culture parochial, and the outlook bleak. When I left home to go to college, I found myself in a constant state of uneasiness. It was several months before I realized it was more than homesickness. It was claustrophobia. The density of Maine- the trees, the ocean, the rivers, the mountains, and the obvious beauty-made me long for the wide open space of the prairie with all its empty spaces and its beauty in small things. Feeling truly alone for the first time made me long for my family, my past, my history. At the same time I was learning to love home, I found dismissal from many people who had never been there. The plains are a place most people only experience from the windows of airplanes while flying from coast to coast. This piece is intended to slow you down, make you put your feet on the ground, if only symbolically. 

This an early and formative exploration of my own identity and a complicated relationship with where I come from. I tried to convey that home can be biological, geographical, relational, and based on the narratives we’ve been told- that raw material is at once powerful and inadequate to describe the full concept. I define home as my own body, my relationships and family, and as the land that grew me up. My father often told me, “It’s the only place you have people in the ground.” Embodied environments are complicated systems without simple resolutions. In this display of bricolage, I hope to recreate in the people who interact with it emotion for something at once personal and universal, home.