In an article titled Tragedy, Peyote, Beat Poets, Yoko Ono. The Nine Lives of an East Village Townhouse, (New York Times, March 24, 2023) John Leland wrote:
“Buildings in New York have past lives that never quite go away. You look at the chain store on the corner and see not just the display of Peeps in the window but the shoe store that was there before it, or maybe the one before that.
It is something about the way time and memory pile up in the city: The past seeps through the thin veneer of the present, and the present appears filtered through the myths of the past. The dialogue between the two provides texture and solidity — the marrow of life in a frenzied hive.”
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I have experienced this multilayered, multidimensional nature in most places that I’ve fallen in love with - in Boston, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and New York City. Time and quiet presence in a place allows for an unfolding of the layers. Some of the photographic images in my work come from places where I’ve spent enough time to enter into those layers of history and existence. The act of photographing these spaces is part of my courtship, or imprinting, or mutual seduction of place.
As I work, I think about how we exist in environments, both natural and man-made. About why we feel connections to certain places and not to others. I am interested in the hidden, the peripheral, the residue of physical objects and of human energy left on or in spaces. I make connections to the concept of ancestors as guides; this manifests as fragments of bodies, hands and legs and so on, in my work. As these figures find their way into a piece, I imagine some of them are messengers, teachers, or guardians.
In 2017 I did a residency in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I researched the geography and history of the city where multiple generations of my ancestors once lived, dating back to the 18th century. I tried to recreate routes they might have traveled in daily life by repeatedly walking those routes, and documenting the experience through various media. From a psychogeographic perspective I then created representative spaces from fabric, paper, wire, plaster, wood, and other materials as maps of the neighborhoods.
During COVID, I began working with deconstructed packaging from food and household products. When laid flat, the folds, seams and flaps were suggestive of floor plans and architectural space in a familiar and intriguing way. It triggered a very early childhood memory I have, of going through my mother’s sewing supplies and playing with the packets that zippers came in - bi-folded thick paper, with cellophane windows, that became buildings in my imagination.
Incorporating text in the work is a personal and spiritual aspect to the process of making. Language goes onto surfaces, usually in a non-linear manner. It serves to inject another layer of meaning, and also as semi-abstract marks that become part of the greater landscape or composition of a piece. It may be read from left to right, from top to bottom, or in any direction that feels right. Much like the imagery on a tarot card, the language is there to facilitate a connection to something in the viewer’s subconscious, that will bring fuller meaning to the work as a whole. In my 2023 body of work Ulterior Spaces, the titles of each piece can be combined to form a poem.
Kelly Knight, 2023