Home seen through a stereoscope.

In the Herbert there’s a Victorian Stereoscope. You look through the eye piece at two almost identical pictures and the lens moves them together so that you see the scene in three d.

For anyone who either grows up in a migrant community or migrates, Home is always an odd word. We could get the bus home from the library and my father would tell me stories about home which were about a totally different place.

So the slide labeled “home” is not two identical scenes that can be transposed over each other to give an illusion of depth, but two completely different pictures linked by the accidents of biography. The place I came from, personalized with my own life stories, by the fact that experiences happen somewhere and memories of that place are coloured by the memory of the experience. Coventry my not be the most beautiful city on the planet but a lot of good things happened there. "Home" where I grew up, forever “back” in past tense.

And home. Where I live now.

When I look through the eye piece at the slide labeled Home, instead of one three d picture, I see a strange imposition of one scene over the other, so neither can be seen entirely clearly. I used to think this was a bad thing.

Now I think it's an interesting perspective.

(The picture of the stereo scope I found at: http://cnx.org/content/m13784/latest/