Click the photo to the left to read the interview of mother by daughter, artist by artist.  The interviewer shares this perspective on the interviewee’s art:

Her work has, over the years, centred on forgotten, vanishing worlds, art and language that exist on the margins. The epigraphs to her novels (TS Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Borges …) often make reference to the persistence of memory. She writes: “The ancient Chinese believed time is not a ladder one ascends into the future but a ladder one descends into the past.” Her new book, The Artist of Disappearance, is made of three delicate stories about the frailty as well as the transforming power of art.

If not universal, it certainly seems a good rule of thumb that by leaving home, and home country, a heightened appreciation for the place left behind can emerge.  Maybe it is especially true over extended periods of time, at risk of romanticizing.  Of course, the opposite may happen too: dismissing the departed home/country as no longer of value.  But in the case of this interview, the right balance seems to be struck.