I chose the hare as the central figure to explore the theme Home and Belonging because it occupies a space between visibility and vulnerability. The hare is not an animal of dominance or spectacle. It survives through attention. Its body is built for listening — long ears lifted, muscles held in quiet readiness, eyes positioned to remain aware of distance.
The hare’s strength is not force, but sensitivity.
Unlike animals that burrow or nest permanently, the hare lives above ground. It rests in a shallow form — an indentation in the earth — exposed to weather, sound, and movement. Home for a hare is not enclosure. It is familiarity with terrain. It belongs not because it is sheltered, but because it is attuned.
The Hare and Home
In this project, the hare becomes a way of thinking about belonging.
Home is often imagined as something solid, built, owned, or fixed. The hare offers another model. It remains in relationship to land without claiming it. It survives through awareness, not control. It listens before it moves. It reads subtle shifts in wind and sound.
Belonging, in this sense, is not arrival. It is attention.
The hare does not impose itself on the landscape, nor does it disappear into it. It exists in tension — visible yet cautious, grounded yet ready. That tension mirrors the experience of negotiating place: being present without complete certainty, rooted without permanence.
Stillness as a Form of Belonging
What draws me repeatedly to the hare is its stillness. Even when nothing is happening, the body remains oriented outward. This posture is not a pause before action, but a sustained condition of listening.
The hare holds space rather than occupies it.
In Reflected Ground, this posture becomes symbolic. Belonging is not depicted as comfort or safety, but as responsiveness — a continual tuning into environment, history, and horizon.
The Hare as Witness
The hare also functions as a quiet witness to changing land — rural edges, roadside verges, cultivated fields. It exists at the boundary between wild and shaped ground. That threshold position allows it to carry questions about settlement, adaptation, and coexistence.
It is both part of the land and slightly apart from it.
That duality allows the project to remain open — not declaring ownership, but exploring relationship.
The hare offers a different understanding of belonging. It does not burrow deeply or claim territory in permanent ways. Instead, it survives through awareness and relationship to land. In my woodcut work, the hare becomes a metaphor for home as attentiveness — a state maintained through listening rather than arrival.