Katie Hickey

Home Holds Its Breath explores themes of memory, absence, and place, focusing on the quiet shift that occurs when a home begins to lose its sense of presence. Domestic interiors, everyday objects, and landscapes connected to home are depicted as a means of reflecting on familiar environments that once held warmth and connection but now remain only as traces, shadows, and memories of the lives they once contained.

Within this body of work, home operates as a site of emotional residue. Time and memory linger within surfaces, objects, and walls, where subtle differences and overlooked details hold a quiet tension. Shadows appear not as fixed figures but as acknowledgements of self within the space, reflecting a relationship to home that feels both familiar and estranged.

This body of work depicts home after presence. The spaces represented are neither entirely abandoned nor fully inhabited, but exist in a state of transition, where memory and absence reshape the familiar. As the work progresses, domestic spaces and objects gradually begin to unravel, reflecting the subtle transformation that occurs when a place once defined by warmth and connection is left behind. Through these paintings, home becomes suspended between comfort and unease, holding both the traces of what remains and the uncertainty of what comes next.