“I was born in the bathtub of this house.”
Home in 12 Slides By Lily Ray
01
I was born in the bathtub in this house. My brothers call me crazy - "I could never live there like you're doing." and they predict our downfall. It makes me reflect on my place in this family: oldest child, only daughter. Have I inherited a sense of being home?
My bedroom has moved over the years. When I moved out of the "kids' room" at 8 years old, I got the little room on the end. My kids are in it now.
I moved out and in and out and in over the years as I needed and wanted to. And now I'm sleeping in the room that used to be my dad's office.
02
The courtyard of this home was created when they cut down the huge connifers (into which I used to plunge my arm to retrieve the newspaper that was delivered early in the morning). The courtyard replaced a porch which was turned into a hallway. We eat our dinner out here, save seeds from cucumbers, pose for first-day-of-school photos, play catch.
03
These are just beautiful photos of the garbage bins. If you've seen the episode of Bluey called "Bin Night", I think, you'll know about bin night. It was enough to make me cry from homesickness when I was deep in winter in Sweden on year two of having been away.
04
The back yard is where I had almost every childhood birthday party, fed the chickens every morning, gardened, swung on the swingset, and hung the washing and collected the washing maybe a thousand times. I've realised on this visit how much I love putting up and taking down clothes. How it grounds me in the changing of the seasons. I am so aware now that it is almost autumn because I haven't experienced anything other than summer in Australia in 10 years.
05
My mum is a hairdresser and our downstairs has been a salon for my whole life. It was my mum's way of being home with us as small children. It was a dual space: play pen in one corner, salon everywhere else: mum's clients became a kind of family. Gradually, since my youngest brother went to school, it's morphed into a dual space of art studio and salon. Only her most loyal clients remain. Here are photos of my mum doing my kids' hair. As a kid, I'd cry after a haircut. My kids are thrilled.
06
We have always eaten together as a family so the dining room is an important place. We use it for craft, meals, conversations. These are combined photos from this visit and last visit, two years apart.
07
I don't think I could say enough about the kitchen so I won't say anything. But these photos are food prep, growing, mum's bowerbirding of vases and found items on the bottom right hand corner.
08
The hallway. We have an oldish house where it's very much built around the hall. The rooms all come off one side of the other. So time is spent there. Mum and dad's collection of historical negatives is housed in the cabinet. We have our family photos on display on it. Interestingly, today, my parents are ripping up the hall runner (carpet) today, though it's been there for decades. Changes are always happening.
09
The room in which my budgies lived. Bubbles was my dear sweet budgerigar friend lived there for 13 years. So did his angry wife, Squeak, whom I never claimed. This room is now a bit lost. It's storage for seed saving and art and plants.
10
This stained glass window is above the staircase that leads to the salon from the kitchen landing. It doesn't belong with the other images but it's important to my sense of place because it's so beautiful and it's been there so long.
11
In my old room where my kids now sleep. We have it dark so they sleep well, but we often don't open the curtains during the day because they're hard to get properly closed again and we're lazy. They don't spend much time in there. Their suitcases are under the bed - symbolic of our temporary stay.
12
Paintings my mum did of my brothers and I. They hang outside the bathroom. I was born in the bath you can see there on the left. "They're amazing, mum." we'd tell her. "They're not great," she said.
Lily Ray is an Australian photographer working in Gothenburg, Sweden. She grew up in Newcastle, on the east coast of Australia where she worked as a journalist before moving to Sweden for love and turning her love of photography into a career. Find her at @lilydray.