Between Loss and Belonging
A section of ‘Split Interiors’, 2025, by Rosie Keane Burrows
Split Interiors captures a dissonance in my mind: fragments of rooms and memories. A blindfolded girl, yearns for more amidst a disjointed backdrop; part motel, part fairy tale, part void.
This collage gathers the transient spaces I’ve occupied - a B&B in Shepherd’s Bush, countless hostels, ephemeral flats. My earlier writings called it urban displacement, belonging, liminality. This collage says it more simply: split interiors.
When I was five, our house was repossessed after three missed mortgage payments. “Gone” first felt like a game of hide and seek until I realised there was no coming back. We landed at The Grantly Hotel, Shepherd’s Bush Green. One room, five people, bunk beds crammed beside a double, a communal bathroom at the end of the hall. The first of many “temporary” accommodations that lingered indefinitely.
From the window came the city’s exhilarating night chorus: car horns, drunks, unfamiliar footsteps. I found solace - a safe space - in looping The Wizard of Oz on VHS, Dorothy’s desperate journey home echoing my own quiet eviction.
In my collage, the towers loom like The Emerald City, always just out of reach. The girl in ruby red sits blindfolded, suspended between loss and anticipation. Later, I’d try to explain all this with theory: exile, belonging, the abyss. But really, it was just a longing to feel at home in borrowed spaces.
Displacement is usually spoken of in terms of refugees, wars, mass upheavals. Yet even moving ten miles felt like uprooting as a child. It’s not always about geography; sometimes it’s the fracture between who you are and where you are. In that crack, identity splinters, and you become a stranger to yourself. The places we inhabit become mirrors, reflecting who we are back at us, though sometimes I wonder if they're fun house mirrors, distorting more than revealing. We flee to new cities, new countries, claiming we want to "lose ourselves," yet secretly hoping to find something better instead. But the joke is this: we can never predict which parts will actually get lost - the parts we desperately wanted to shed, or the precious fragments we never meant to abandon.
Collage gives me a way to hold these fragments together. To turn chaos into composition. To take a broken thing and make it mine.
Split Interiors is less a resolution than a map. Drawn on scraps, marked by detours, its path traced by a blindfolded figure searching mostly in her own darkness. It reveals not only loss but also the strange allure of living in between. Perhaps home isn’t Kansas, or a house, or four safe walls. Perhaps it’s the act of untying the blindfold, creating and recreating our interiors until they finally feel whole.
