A Soft Place to Land | Jenny Western (on Kerri-Lynn Reeves)

Response to A Study on How to Get Personal by Kerri-Lynn Reeves

“I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order).”

                                                - Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Manifesto”

            Kerri-Lynn Reeves and I have known each other for approximately forever. It has actually been ten years, but it feels like longer. We have collaborated on curatorial and artistic projects, and we text often about everything from art to motherhood. In the last few years, as we have collected seven children between us, our correspondence has focused more and more upon motherhood. We texted when Kerri-Lynn became the Artist-In-Residence at Harcourt House. We texted when we both got pregnant in 2020, a tenuous year to welcome new life into the world. This was during a time of global crisis while I watched my friend juggle a position in academia and adjust to life in a new city with her daughter all while entering a fresh family dynamic. I sat on the sidelines pouring juice for my kids, wondering how on earth she was pulling all of this off.

            I know that social practice informs much of Kerri-Lynn’s work so it’s not surprising that the events of these last few years of life have found their way into her art. And I have followed with interest throughout her residency as she has grasped for a way to reflect upon personal and family issues in a way that employs an abstract visual language to guard and obscure the vulnerable topics which she is interrogating.

            When Kerri-Lynn and I chatted recently about the artwork she has been making the call was interrupted by our children coming and going at will; her daughter settling down for bedtime and my kids bounding in from a bike ride. Their presence forced punctuations and breaks to our conversation and yet it is their presence in our lives that informs much of what we create and discuss. One of the central talking points we come back around to is, How to make artwork about motherhood? And not just artwork about being a mother and a caregiver but also about the need to be cared for, the desire to be upheld by our communities.

            The two bodies of art that Kerri-Lynn has been working on during her residency intrigue me. Her ceramic vessels in various states of completion were a surprise at first, I didn’t realize that ceramics where within my friend’s wheelhouse. And yet I shouldn’t be surprised, we have joked that she is a ‘Jack of all trades’ as many artists and mothers are wont to be. While the vessels point to the old chestnut that mothers need to ‘fill up their own cups first’ in order to care for their families, it is the way that Kerri-Lynn is making visible the work of her hands as agents of care that draws me in. Despite a deep abiding love for our children, there is no perfection in motherhood and I like how Kerri-Lynn allows the fluctuating emotional state of this imperfect role to be laid bare in the range of ceramic work. She is revealing something about being an artist and a mother while not offering the overt representations of motherhood such as someone like Mary Cassat.

            I like the soft sculptures she has been making too. Looking at them I am instantly reminded of the stacks of breastfeeding pillows the midwives propped around me as I was first learning to nurse my babies. When Kerri-Lynn talks with me about the sculptures she mentions a bygone text conversation between us about parenting and life when I asked her, “What do YOU need today?” Her instinct was that she herself needed something to prop her up. For mother artists, there can be a feeling of alienation from a previously welcoming art scene that no longer seems to recognize us or celebrate the gentleness with which we may now need to operate. Of course parents are not the only ones who need softness, particularly now in today’s world, and I feel that Kerri-Lynn’s sculptures offer a soft place to land. We could all use a comforting space for our nervous systems to rest and reset right now. It is the very part of ourselves that needs mothering; not necessarily by our mothers, but by ourselves, by our communities, and by our culture.