Kasie Campbell
Milk Diaries, 2020
Live studio session on April 28, 2020 at 6:30 PM (MST)
It almost feels like I have spent the past two years in isolation. I’ve been consistently trying to navigate my artistic practice through intense waves of grief over the loss of my mum, infertility/miscarriage, and a fear of mortality and dying. Things have shifted in the last 4 months, with added postpartum anxieties, healing associated with childbirth, obsessive tracking of my baby’s feeds, breastfeeding struggles and COVID-19.
With the COVID pandemic, there has been increased anxieties surrounding my newborns health in a time like this. Will Edie be okay? What if she gets sick? What about her check-ups? How do I protect her? Am I feeding her enough? What if my milk dries up and I can't feed her? What if I get sick, who will feed her? Money? Where will it come from? Am I spending adequate time with my other daughter? What if she gets sick? How am I supposed to help her with homeschooling? How will I maintain a studio practice?
As a way to ease my anxieties, I started pumping breast milk. I pump at 5:00 every morning after our first feed. I began photographing the bags of breastmilk as a way to document life postpartum, anxieties about mumhood and life in COVID-19. The act of pumping breastmilk and freezing it has been a way for me to cope and has eased anxieties around getting sick and not being able to feed my baby. Postpartum anxieties are exacerbated by the times we are living in.
1. Food
3. Day 20
5. When you were dying
7. I lost two
9. Mom always said
11. Pure letdown
13. Projections
15. I puked
17. I check to see if
19. I’m gonna live so long
21. Mama, what if?
2. I made bread today
4. Slacker tit
6. What if?
8. I helped her
10. I weigh her
12. If you were alive
14. Wiped the corners
16. I panicked
18. My nipples
20. 4 months pp
Kasie Campbell is a visual artist working out of Edmonton, AB. In 2015, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in Sculpture at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, AB. Campbell’s work integrates a variety of media including sculpture, photography, and installation with performative means. Themes of the abject and simultaneous tensions surrounding the female body have been major points of interest in her work. Campbell has exhibited her work throughout Canada and internationally at Grounds for Sculpture (south of NYC), Mana Contemporary in Hamilton, NJ, Mana Contemporary in Chicago, IL, New York City at the Westbeth Gallery and more recently, Viljandi, Estonia.