Kerri-Lynn Reeves
A study on how to get personal
Jenny Western’s reflections on this work can be found here.
Live studio visit with Kerri-Lynn Reeves and Jenny Western was held on June 23, 2022. Watch the recording below.
My art has always been a place for me to process and make sense of life. This particular season of life has been very full. The pandemic has challenged us all in the most nuanced and individual of ways, as life has continued on despite so much of societal operations being put “on hold”. For me personally, I have experienced some major “life events” during these last years: a move, new job, single parenting, healing from abuse, legal stuff, new relationship, mourning deaths, being pregnant, giving birth, co-parenting a blended family of four, maternity leave, postpartum depression, teaching hybrid, and tenure-track process. And all within the context of the pandemic and continuing to try to be engaged in artistic, cultural, and political happenings. This has been a lot of life and has left me feeling as if my plate is full but my cup is getting quite empty.
These life experiences have really shaped how I am approaching my position as the 2021-2022 Artist-in-Residence at Harcourt House Artist-Run-Centre. I started as A.I.R. on November 1st, the same day that my maternity leave ended, I returned to work, and my infant started daycare.
After a period of life in which I have held space for my family, students, and community, this residency has been an opportunity to nurture my creative self through a dedicated studio practice leading to an interactive exhibition. At Harcourt, I have been creating a series of craft-based artworks focused on notions of care and healing, with the working title of Holding / Work in Progress (WIP). These works include hand-quilted banners, block-printed soft sculptures, and ceramic vessels.
The act of holding is a willful act of supporting. Holding space for oneself and for another are parts of empathetic social interaction, in which you create and honour space for supporting each other in your humanity (needs, desires, challenges, strengths). I see this project as a place of comfort, support, and healing after these long months of social isolation and political upheaval.
I am experimenting with how to combine the politics of slow production with daily rituals of making through iterative and repetitive production that focus on process rather than product. My hands have been busy these past years and months tending to family – increasing my somatic intelligence through motherhood. I am curious as to what capability my body holds when applying that same care and persistence to materials. Through this, I am playing with what production can be when turning that empirical knowledge to art making.
I started the residency by initiating a series of clay sculptures that address notions of the body, ritual, and care. This is my first endeavour in throwing on a potter’s wheel. I am using it as a way of holding space for myself regularly. The resulting vessels become material manifestations of the space that I have held – physically shaping material into hollow containers while emotionally holding space for introspection. A type of moving meditation, I work on these clay pieces intuitively, allowing my hands and the clay to respond to each other, in essence a material expression of my somatic experience and empirical knowledge held in my body.
Throwing clay on the wheel requires a balance between the wheel’s centripetal force (moving inwards) and the clay’s centrifugal force (moving outwards). The artist’s hands have to find the balance of these forces and move that energy up in a steady way. The hands have to work from the inside to the outside of the clay to centre and expand it materially, while simultaneously supporting the outside boundaries. Everything depends on centred energy, including the energy of the artist. When I come to the studio scattered and stressed my vessels implode or explode into a mess of wet clay. When I can become grounded and centred through the process of throwing, I can help to guide the vessel towards balance and stability as well. I am finding this to be much like social interactions - for example if I come to an interaction with one of my children with my energy off balance, the interaction is sure to explode or implode. I must be centred to guide the interaction evenly and help to support each of us in balance.
The way that I am approaching this residency is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s feminist treatise “A Room of One’s Own” which speaks to the importance of womxn needing space dedicated to our own pursuits, especially creative ones. This personal space creates boundaries from our other types of labour, especially important when womxn are often responsible for the bulk of the emotional and physical labour of domestic duties and caregiving. This imbalance of labour has been especially highlighted globally by the current pandemic, especially for working mothers. Though I have found great support in my own family and friends, I have found the art world at large to be lacking in support for the challenging balance of art and caregiving. Through Holding / WIP, I am trying to create a space of support that acknowledges us all as intersectional beings with personal obligations, needs, desires, and spirits.
As I have to move from one role/world to another frequently every day (from home/mother to work/professor to studio/artist) I have had to develop rituals and activities that help me to ground myself quickly in that space and take on the labour it requires. Oracle tools such as tarot cards have helped me to settle quickly in the studio in an intuitive and focused way. From this I often do quick drawings or notes to get things flowing.
These sketches include compositions of geometric shapes and designs of soft sculptures to support bodies. From these sketches, I create soft banners and sculptures. The banners are hand-quilted and partially hand-dyed. The sculptures are hand-printed fabric covering various stuffing materials. These objects are directly inspired by my friend Jenny Western asking me periodically throughout my pregnancy and postpartum period, what I needed that day. Every time I thought in response “I need support. I need something to hold me up so I can keep going.” These sculptures therefore reference props used in mindfulness and bodywork practices, as well as bodies onto themselves. Through them I am exploring how soft support, without internal systems of rigid structure, might function as adaptive, responsive, and customizable to the bodies of different individuals. They ask how we can soften to become resilient. I see this as an intersectional feminist approach to scultupre and support.
Throughout the pandemic, we have become more aware of our bodies – our biological bodies through the threat to our health, our social bodies through physical isolation and social distancing, and our racialized and gendered bodies through heightened political activism. I have been seeking out teachings around body and trauma, especially racialized and gendered trauma. The idea that psychological upsets are felt, stored, and processed in our body means that this trauma is also healed through the body. I am interested in making art objects that can transform a formal artistic setting into a space for emotional and physical support through creative play. As such, I seek to make work that calms the body’s nervous system and creates space for healing and connection.
Overall, the residency and exhibition will aid in a healing transition and safe re-emergence of myself to my art practice and perhaps, of our community to the public world. Holding / WIP will highlight ideas of transition and emergence, through ongoing practices of making and doing as intersectional feminist approaches. It is my goal that when people leave the resulting exhibition (planned for October of this year) they feel settled and calm in their bodies.
I want to extend great gratitude to Harcourt House for this meaningful opportunity and to the Edmonton Arts Council for their support.
About the Artist
Website: www.kerrilynnreeves.com
Instagram: @kerrilynnreeves
Kerri-Lynn Reeves (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and mother originally from rural Manitoba, where she grew up as a European-Canadian settler on Treaty 2 land. At the heart of it, her work explores the relationship of the social and the material through the use of spatial, relational, and craft practices. With a commitment to blurring the lines between life and art, Reeves earned her Master of Fine Arts - Studio Arts in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia University in 2016 with her first child strapped to her chest. Reeves, now a mother / step-mother of four, continues to explore the confluences of her art making, teaching, and parenting practices. Reeves is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Studio Arts at MacEwan University in Edmonton, AB, ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan), Treaty 6 Territory.