I seek to explore and understand the physical environment in which I live. I grew up in the Lafayette Square neighborhood of St. Louis, where my parents bought a crumbling Victorian townhouse and spent fifteen years restoring it. We often visited my relatives who lived in the suburbs, and the striking differences I observed between their homes and neighborhoods and my own made me aware of the nature and quality of the built environment from an early age. In 2002 I moved to Tampa, where I lived for five years and where I found myself both alienated and fascinated by the landscape of this more recently developed, subtropical city which differed so radically from the type of urban environment I had

always known. Through these and other experiences of place, I became intrigued by the varying and often puzzling ways in which our manmade surroundings develop and take the forms that they do.

My work is largely about my explorations of the various built environments in which I have found myself, seeking to understand these places and my own responses to them. I seek to discover the hidden relationships between our visible surroundings and the social and cultural values that have created them, as well as to explore the resulting effects on our lived experience of a place. It is my intention to explore space as a psychogeographer, investigating the various and subtle ways in which the

characteristics of the physical environment affect the human psyche. Why do we feel more at home in some places and more alienated in others? What makes some places feel comfortable and delightful, and what makes other places decidedly not so? In exploring such questions, I seek to illuminate our relationship to the environments that we have made for ourselves, both how our shifting cultural values have shaped them and how we in turn are shaped by our built surroundings.

Kara Clark Holland received her MFA from the University of South Florida in 2007. She currently resides in St. Louis, Missouri.