No Place
Like Home
Lisa Jarrett
[Published by Small School, Raleigh, NC in "Looking for Direction: Field Notes from Lions Park; A Community Bike Hub Project by Small School," 2025, p10-11]
It has been a long time since I spent a week at a comfort station in a public park. As it turns out, spending a week somewhere is all it takes for a place to become familiar. It reminded me of the way it feels to be called home. Bone deep. Imagining and defining a home-place has been central to my art practice for the foreseeable past, and my increasing curiosity about socially engaged art’s ability to connect people to one another (and to public spaces) is the path that ultimately brought me to Raleigh and this Small School collaboration at/with Lions Park.
Looking for direction: Field Notes from Lion’s Park began with collaborating artists (JP, Karl, Sally, and myself*) trying to imagine what working in a park comfort station could mean, how that related to bicycles, and how both of those ideas connected to care and repair for people and place in Raleigh. I began to obsess about the people who took care of the park’s land and facilities. Who were they? Karl and I had long conversations at my kitchen table in Portland about everything imaginable–from the history of the land’s first custodians to Raleigh’s complicated history with segregation that racialized public access to so-called public space; from memories of playground lessons to raising children; and from cookouts at family reunions to kids building imaginary worlds in the woods. Somehow all of it mattered to this project.
We couldn’t help thinking about it all as a constellation; the urgency of any single idea/history/community/perspective giving way to the evolving shape we might make if we attempted to hold everything together. We took cues from the ways public parks operate. Ultimately, we facilitated a series of themed workshops open to the community that were loosely connected to how people “make place.” Everyone was invited. We selected a group of readings to share that were as broad in range as the project’s scope–poems, essays, letters, and folktales. Over the course of the week workshop participants came and went. We began each morning by reading together and discussing what each piece of writing asked us to notice. Together, we turned our attention to the site and asked ourselves, “What do you notice here, today, at Lions Park? What do you hope people coming after you might see? What will you leave behind as a trace?” We also spent time clearing out spiders and installing a community bike repair center in the neglected rooms of the comfort station. People would come here and learn to notice and fix whatever was broken. The tools and volunteers would be here, taking care.
At the end of the week, when it was time to fly home to Oregon where I live and work, I worried about the park. I missed it. It had already become part of me. I thought about the people I met and wondered how they were. I thought about Sally, JP, and Karl. I wanted a second helping of green beans at Carmen’s place with Precious sitting beside me. I imagined my little markers in the woods, and the crow who talked to us each day, this vocal, non-human creature who lived there taking care of crow things. I considered my conversations at the park’s community center with the director Christie and her assistant Miss Joyce, and I smiled remembering the four little girls who found us on the last hour of the last day. Halo, 6; Aaleyah, 8; Malana, 7; and Mo, 5. This was their park! They ran over to us from the playground, screaming joyfully and dove right in, marking their time in this place and eating cookies. Somehow they understood they were calling me home.
*Collaborating Artists: Karl Burkheimer, Sally Van Gorder, Lisa Jarrett, and JP Reuer