How well do you remember the house you grew up in? Alex Morrison’s Every House I’ve Ever Lived In Drawn From Memory (2000) asks this question by presenting the viewer with 29 pencil drawings of houses he lived in. Morrison depicts his houses as transparent three-dimensional floor plans that strip all exterior characteristics from their structures. Each drawing leaves a series of rooms, hallways, and stairs, superimposed and overlapping one another in a forest of vertical lines. The viewer’s eyes chase through these lines trying to disentangle the spaces Morrison depicts.
Morrison makes two intelligent decisions in rendering his houses. First, by removing all sentimental objects, Morrison forces the viewer to concentrate on the interior spaces themselves. The structures in the drawings emerge only after the viewer enters the house; such recognizable features as windows and stairs act as anchors from which our eyes float through the rooms, discovering which lines construct the space we’re standing in. Without objects in the rooms, we must concentrate on space itself: where to turn a corner, finding the door. Only by visually moving through these spaces can we understand what the houses look like.
Morrison also chooses to retain ambiguities from his memories in his drawings. Mistakes are everywhere. Hallways and dissolve into rooms, floors are superimposed awkwardly on one another, and stairways are sometimes rendered as impossibly steep. The simplest of the drawings depict single rooms or basement spaces, while the most complex include walk up apartments and multi-level houses. Some of the drawings are very small, perhaps indicating that Morrison remembers less of these structures. Others have no obvious entrances. These characteristics may be intentional, but the piece’s title suggests that these mistakes are instances where Morrison is struggling with his memory. With 29 houses in the series, it’s not surprising that details become blurred (Morrison has recently expanded the series to include 35 houses). Seeing Morrison struggle with his memories of these spaces reveals the gestalt of spaces we live in. All of the characteristics of our living arrangements, rooms, objects, and people, combine to create our memories of space, but when we leave, only the space itself remains.
Looking at Morrison’s houses forces the viewer to reevaluate his own memories. How clear are our memories of the places where we spent so much time? We may remember, say, “the room with the grandfather clock,” but can we accurately render the vessel that held us and the clock within the house? Morrison’s work separates memories of objects from memories of space. Looking at these drawings brings to mind moving out of a house, seeing the rooms without any of your belongings and wondering what of the place you will remember, just before you lock the door for the last time.
