Grief, language, sculpture with Lydia Kern

LYDIA KERN was a recent resident at Yaddo and a recipient of the Diane Gabriel Visual Artist Award. 

In this episode Kimberly and Lydia talk about Lydia's integration of her experiences of grief and her appreciation for collective human experience. They also talk about Lydia's love for art and language and her studio rituals associated with the preparation of found objects.

Transcript

Thanks again for tuning in to this week's episode of Art Uncovered. This week, I am so honored to be here with Lydia Kern from Burlington, Vermont. Lydia, thanks for joining us. Thank you.

I'm so happy to be here.

Yeah, I'm so glad to connect with you. I love your work. And I mentioned off air, I love your writing and your writing style. It is reminiscent of automatic writing or a stream of consciousness . I really appreciate it. I can't wait to talk about it, but to start, I'm wondering if we can talk about your work in order to ground listeners into your practice . So your work seems to be inspired largely by religious iconography. So I'm curious, is your family religious?

I appreciate that question because I love learning about how artists become who they are and what they're drawn to, so I actually grew up in what at the time was called the Evangelical Church, which then later took a more like charismatic route in high school and these are all really niche identifiers for certain communities. B I was surrounded by a lot of storytelling and a lot of metaphors and a lot of ways of group connecting. I don't identify with those groups or those belief systems anymore, certainly not in the same way, but that sort of architecture stayed with me as I remade my own metaphors for making meaning.

You referenced language and stories there . I'm wondering if we could maybe transition to talk a bit about some of the themes tend to pop up in your work. I made a list of some of them. I know grief is a big one. Loss . D you want to add to this list?

Yeah, at its simplest form, I'm interested in these intense emotional experiences that are part of the human experience and moments that make us who we are, whether that's our family or loss or different experiences of love in our life.

And I began making work as a way of creating a system of meaning and as a marker or memorial for loss. And that has stayed with me throughout my practice I think about points of impact a lot right now.

You mentioned loss in one of your statements. Was it a sister that you lost a couple of years ago?

Yeah. And it's really interesting how you can start from somewhere. I think it was some ecologist, maybe it was John Muir, who said " when you pull the root out, you find that it's connected to everything else." Deep grief is like that as well. It reaches some of our deepest emotions.

My work is all very emotional . It starts at that seed. But if you delve deeper into that, it connects to all these other parts of life. It was about a decade ago when I unexpectedly lost my younger sister. And I think a lot of my work comes down to this really simple thing, which is to have witnessed something happen but to know that love that continues on after that .

I also think that has to do with a lot of the preservation that you see in my work. There's an acknowledgement of the fragility of life. But also how precious it is. Grief is very spherical to me. It's not a two dimensional flat experience. It has to do with the loss of matter and the loss of form.

And so sculpture felt like the right medium for me in that way, because it is this creating of new relationships with different materials. So that sort of externalization has been important to me. I've just had a lot of powerful experiences. The work acts as a witnesser for me, but it also, in certain situations, the best moments are when people feel witnessed by my work, or something resonates emotionally for them too.

That's art at its best.

Ha, yeah. A lot of these are just statements about what? Art in general.

I would love to, if you're okay with it, read a passage you wrote. I think it was in relation to one of your more recent bodies of work.

Yes, of course.

OK, great. Here it goes:

How my mom grieved and birthed at the same time/ thinking about my womb twin clearly, but also about my sister, Jackie, who I lost when she was in college almost nine years ago/ I can feel the intent of your big toe in the shoes left in your closet/ I run my fingers over the soul like a holy braille, and remember we are the same size/ I stitch around the rose, around the perimeter of your absence, to know its shape, to try to keep it in place/ Wendy sewing Peter Pan's shadow, impossible to keep.

Thank you for reading that. It's interesting to hear it, I mean to me it sounds like the sculpture, because I sew all these disparate parts together . I think about these pieces as as placeholders or like catchalls for the emotions or experiences that we go through that are beyond language, that we can't fully grasp.

Growing up in the environments I grew up in, there were certain spaces where there were a lot of answers and there was a lot of language and there was a lot of belief overlaid onto the human experience.

And I think about how important it is to have room for the ambiguous things and the nuanced places and the spaces of mystery and unknown that are felt but not fully conceived. And I feel that way about still loving someone that is no longer here. There's a mystery to that of form being gone, but the relationship still being there and I think about sculptures as that place where that can rest.

I also think about some of the objects in these as like sentimental gestures, like all of my work is really sentimental like that.

What are some objects in here that are sentimental?

Yeah, I'll just I'll show you this picture real quick [ Lydia holds up a photograph to the screen].

This is an image I took in the first two weeks after my sister's passing. It's a pile of envelopes from condolence cards that my parents received . And it really struck me because so many people said " there are no words for your loss," but blah, blah, blah. So we like, we do the gesture to try and hold something that is too big. It's too emotional. It's a life event t too large for words.

And so I think about these objects and they're like that as well. It's cool because sometimes I'll be working on a piece and then materials will come to me while I'm making it that align with what I'm thinking about.

And I love those moments. Like this piece, for instance, this piece in really simple terms, is about my mom's pregnancy when she was having me. So I had a womb twin that disappeared around six months. And so my mom's ultrasound is in there. I like to use these really finite, deeply personal experiences to relate to these larger shared human experiences of what it means to exist but still be connected to an absence where part of.

So this is a self portrait and there's this rose that's wrapped up in embalming thread.

I see some references here to what I read in that short text about threading or sewing around a rose.

Exactly. The silhouette of that rose goes throughout the piece. I was thinking about tracing an absence or trying to hold on to something that can't be held down or trying to grasp at something that you can't fully, you can't fully hold.

There's also a spider web that I sewed into this and that was really fun. I just watched a YouTube video of how spiders do it. And with that I was thinking about what it mean s to make your home in the whole of something. What does it mean to make a home within the point of impact and have that home be made out of your own body? I'm thinking about my mom's womb in the same way and ideas of wanting to return to a place that you can't go back to, but it's still with you that like distant memory too.

Beautiful . I have so many, I have so many follow up questions I want to ask you.

One-- Did your artistic practice start after the unexpected loss of your sister or were you making work prior to that?

I was very casually making work, but I don't really do anything very casually. Ha. I was always interested in making work and there was an artist in my town growing up that had a studio North Star Studio, Jack Fanniff.

It was really cool to witness his practice as a middle schooler. I would just go there after school sometime and make work and he taught classes. In college I studied social work but I was really drawn to objects. I had one sculpture one class with Nancy Dwyer , which was formative. So I had a taste, but it wasn't until [my sister] passed that [art became my goal]. . It felt really clear then that when this happened, and it was very world rearranging, like it felt very clear that being with the people I cared about and making work made sense to me when having a five year plan certainly did not.

The other question I wanted to ask was in regards to your sourcing of material. I read this amazing statement on your website that your work has led you to forage through things like dumpsters and compost piles .

I wonder if you could talk a bit about this journey for objects?

It varies a lot based on the project, but I always have my eyes open and it is just like a way of moving through the world. Like sometimes I'll find an object. And it'll stay on my shelf or on my materials queue for like years. And then other times it'll go immediately into a work, or sometimes I'll source something from eBay. If I need something really specific and it's confusing the algorithm. Like I've had times where it thinks that I'm a medical student or a musician. I'm like, no, none of the above. But it's also really special becaue over the years I've had multiple situations where friends will bring me objects or be like, do you want this? Are you interested in this? And so it's fun to have that sort of exchange because then the object has more of a little micro history to it that is relational and connective between me and someone that I care about as well.

I also like processing objects and materials. That is a big part of my work. The sentimentality and the care that goes into preparing materials. It's not just dis similar to caring for someone you love or a body. I think a lot about how separated we are in our modern burial practices and how sanitized it is and how connecting with that loss and someone we love. I didn't have that opportunity when I lost my sister, but I do think about just these really visceral moments in life when we are stripped of in our current late capitalist culture.

Last year, for example, I was collecting like hundreds and thousands of flowers for a public work that I'm making for Burlington and the process of going to farms or the side of the road or receiving flowers from friends and family. The process of collecting and organizing has a lot of meaning for me.

One last follow up question that will take us to the end . So this morning you sent me a video that was formatted really interesting. It was a grid of boxes showing a river and a gesture of wrapping a rose...Can you tell us what we have going on here?

Yeah, I made these video clips from an intuitive emotional place last year at Yaddo. I think about each clip as a material, it's not necessarily narrative it's emotional, it's experiential, but I was excited about organizing them in the structure of the grid. Cause to me, this is a quilt. This is a window portal. We use grids as our navigational systems.

There's the essay by Rosalind Krauss, where she talks about the grid and how artists have always used the grid as a mode of vision. It got me thinking about how certain emotional experiences can change your motive, your lens for viewing the world. And, all of these clips, there is a sense of flow. It's a literal river. It seems like rivers are organized, but they're not, they're certainly not a grid, so it's just it was helpful to have that structure to put that within.

And the shots of the candles are from a performative sculpture that I made where I reclaimed a lot of candles that were used in church services and glued them all to this folding chair and lit it. it was really interesting to me how they all melt into one. And it also reminded me of the sentimental act of lighting a candle for a lost one, loved one, you enter a holy place. But there was something about how they all came together and almost look like tadpoles or dissolved boundaries . And I really liked that.

I'm interested in working more in time based media because emotions happen in real time, right?. So I think it makes sense.

Listening to you talk there helped me grasp a better understanding of your forms because you're dealing with these gigantic and ephemeral ideas, such as memories and grief, and they don't have any form or structure. They're literally thoughts. So by setting limitations to your forms, you're allowing us tangible access. It's very exciting. I'm a super big fan of your work.

Do you have any like upcoming shows or anything like this that we can promote for you?

I do! I'm in a group show that I'm excited about. It is at Overlap Gallery in Newport, Rhode Island and it was curated by Kendall DeBoer and Maya Rubio. It opens August 10th. I'm really excited for that. I love group shows. Group shows are the disparate parts coming together to make something bigger. I love being in the context of other people.