Map of Home

Map-making can be a wonderful art project with lots of skills to practice. It involves creativity in coming up with the place and elements and style. It involves realism if creating maps of places in the real world in order to have an accurate map. It involves good craftsmanship to keep the map clean and readable. An especially fun way to practice these skills in map-making is to create a map of home. This makes it a very personal project that you can express yourself through.

But how do you create a map of home when you're not sure where home is?

As a TCK who has lived in the U.S. and two cities in Turkey, this project challenged me. The place that most feels like home would be Adana, Turkey, as I grew up there for 13 years. It is the most familiar. It is where I have the most memories. But as an American, though I wouldn't consider it home exactly, the U.S. is where my family is, and it is where I will live after I graduate. The times I've visited the U.S. have played a part in shaping me as well. And now that I live in Istanbul, it is slowly becoming more and more like home for me as it becomes familiar. I have made so many friends and made so many memories even in the 6 months I've lived here. Add to that the fact that in a way I feel at home whenever I'm with my friends and the fact that my friends live all around the world, and you can clearly see that there is no one place that is home for me.

My solution was to combine multiple places into one cohesive map. Originally I wanted this combination to create a feeling of longing to be in all my homes at once. But as I worked on it, I had so much fun creating it that it ended up being more of a fun piece, reflecting the happiness of having all my homes in one spot.

The primary places in this map were, of course, Adana and Istanbul. These are the places I've lived and remember living in. Adana covers the southern portion, with the Seyhan Dam of Adana turning into the Golden Horn and Bosphorus of Istanbul in the north. Bridges and roads connect the two sides to make it one cohesive place. And right in the middle where the bodies of water connect lie the "TCK Islands" as I named them, islands shaped like the continents to represent all the other places I have lived and visited and that have shaped me.

Within the areas of Adana and Istanbul, I included some general elements for realism, such as parks, woods, and roads. The areas that I labeled or developed icons for were the ones that were significant to me personally. These include the three apartments I have lived in, the public Turkish school I went to for five years, the two churches I've been a part of, the malls I spend lots of time with friends at, the park I go to for a homeschool co-op, my youth group, the well known ferry boat docks of Istanbul, an area of the city called Kadıköy where I also hang out with friends and my parents, and lastly the metro line that I ride on so often that allows me to get to so many of these places.

If you asked me where I'm from, this map would be a pretty accurate summary.