Not to Scale II

In the time I spent apart from the places and people I loved in Northampton, I became interested in further exploring the themes of home and memory through art. I also became curious about how running for the Smith cross country and track teams may have contributed to building a sense of home in Northampton. As part of my senior thesis project, I interviewed twenty six of my teammates (most of whom had also been away from Northampton for quite a while) about their memories of running at Smith and in the surrounding areas. I wanted to stay connected with them and with our team’s collective memories of being together, and see if they felt that running impacted their experiences of certain places. Most of us agreed that running helps us know a place more thoroughly, and better understand how to navigate, but we also realized that it is a unique and intuitive type of navigation that doesn’t always translate to the bird’s-eye format of a typical map. Despite this fact, and their fears of getting it wrong, some of my teammates were willing to draw maps from memory of their favorite running routes, and “Not to Scale II” (2021) was created (also from memory) as a composite map of all the routes they had mentioned. It was painful and frustrating to create, the challenges of embroidery mirroring the challenge of remembering how the routes fit together, and though it is not accurate, it shows how and where running helped us feel at home. I also realized, over the course of attending school remotely and then being able to return to Northampton with my teammates for a final semester, that home is about both the place and the people. A big part of why I felt so at home on all those runs and in my years at Smith was because of the people who surrounded me. After graduation, I moved back to Northampton because I still feel strongly that these places and people are my home.