Home as feeling

Home may seem like a universal idea that means the same to everyone. But at a time when anti-immigration movements are on the rise, it’s important to consider how we ‘practice home’ as a community. In a series of three blog posts, Deveron Projects' Co-producer Bruce Phillips reflects on how ‘home’ is created and explored through the regular events that make up our HOME programme. Bruce asks how these events and future developments might help us create new inclusive understandings of home that embrace feeling, flow and connection. 

The HOME programme celebrates local knowledge and experiences, and explores what it's like to live and work in and around Huntly. It includes artist residencies as well as free, regular events: Friday Lunch (1-2pm every second and fourth Friday), Food Chain (6-8pm, every last Monday) and a stall at the Huntly Farmers' Market (10am-1pm every first Saturday). These events help create a sense of home through the everyday activities of cooking and eating, chatting and caring, sharing skills and learning together. 

Home as feeling

Comfort, security and shelter are usually the first things we think of in terms of home. We long to retreat to a physically safe place to relax and rest. In many ways our community hub Square Deal, where the regular HOME programme events take place, provides this role of a home-like physical sanctuary. The Deveron Projects team have put in a lot of energy to create this home away from home – originally developing it as a ‘living room’ for the town. It is warm and comfortable, it has furniture, a toilet, a fire alarm system, a kitchen and wifi. It has toys for children, soft furnishings and books to read. It protects us from bad weather, traffic noise and the busyness of life. Square Deal, is also part of a larger building that has accommodation with beds and work spaces for visiting artists on residency. So it is very much a home in a conventional sense.  

Similarly we require these same physical properties to create our private homes – amenities that enable living and a structure that shelters us from external forces so we can be safe and relaxed. When any one of these physical aspects are broken or removed it can be unsettling and unsafe. That said, we need to be cautious of  overemphasising home as a physical space. 

In her book Feeling as Home, writer and tenant organiser Alva Gotby argues that the fixation on home being a physical space can cause us to overlook home being emotionally constructed [1]. Acknowledging home as an emotional space is to value the effort of love and care – be that in a private residence or in community hubs such as Square Deal. We could recognise this through everyday tasks such as cooking, cleaning, bathing and resting. To this I would add listening and discussion as well as encouraging moments of joy, celebration and play. Gotby’s also prompts us to pay attention to the absence of love and care or when it might be co-opted in patterns of abuse, control and conditioning. To build more inclusive ideas of home, Gotby asks us to “do feeling” [2] – meaning to centre emotion in organisations by nurturing supportive social dynamics and  inspiring collective joy and creativity. “Home”, she writes, “home can be a dominant feeling in our lives … [but] feeling is political … [and] can mobilise people, motivate them to take action.” [3]

Gotby’s notion of ‘doing feeling’ is already well established in the HOME programme. For instance, there have been plenty of moments of doing feeling during Food Chain events. Each month someone shares a recipe that reminds them of home, we then cook the meal and eat it together and often trade stories of how we make our version of the meal, or how different foods spark memories and connections with different places. Over the last year alone we cooked a cherished family welsh cake recipe, we improvised risotto together, we warmed our bellies with Kurma and learned how to make chapathis from scratch, and we celebrated the Asian Lunar New Year by making dumplings from China, Korea and Mongolia. 

At Food Chain, everyone gets stuck in. We look after each other by maintaining food safety standards, we help each other out with food prep, we take the initiative to start the washing up and setting the table or making sure everything is prepared and cooked. When we eventually sit down to eat the meal together there is a strong feeling of belonging with everyone chatting, serving each other food and enjoying what we have made. Our time spent together under the physical roof of Square Deal would be nothing if it were not for the efforts of hospitality by everyone to make the event happen with generosity and support. In doing so, our group effort to cook together with feeling transforms ideas of home from the physical and individualistic into the emotional and collective.

References:

[1] Alva Gotby, Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing (Verso, London/New York, 2025).
[2] Ibid, 152.
[3] Ibid, pp151-152.