Isha Khanzode

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“Home is Where the Latch-hook is”

In the middle of the title page, there is an image of a latch-hook rug I made depicting a house. As I made the rug, I started researching the domestic origins of latch-hooking and discovered its eventual commodification. That led me to thinking about the home itself and its mass commodification during the nineteen fifties residential construction boom. Using the original implications of latch-hooking and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” as a starting point, this essay attempts to define what a home should be and what real life inequities emerge in the development of mass housing structures.

Isha Khanzode is an artist based in Los Angeles, but originally from Boston, Massachusetts. Her work spans many mediums including video, watercolor, animation, sculpture and fiber art, through which themes of discomfort and displacement are often explored humorously by use of satire. Most pieces work to capture a specific emotional state of being stemming from seemingly unusual or unbelievable circumstances.