Interview by Amber Imrie-Situnayake
Artist Statement of Kay HealySince 2008 I have been creating large-scale screenprints of furniture, based on images I have found online, from my childhood, and most recently a series created based on other people’s descriptions of their childhood homes. Through my art I investigate themes of transience and the search for stability in an ever-changing world. I am by nature a nostalgic person and am very interested in how an object as mundane as a plastic salad spinner can embody vivid memories of people, events, and periods of someone’s life.
Screenprinting allows me to make large-scale works that I can detach from with relative ease. If I made large-scale paintings, each one would be too precious to wheatpaste onto buildings or gallery walls, which destroys the art object. In direct contrast to my nostalgic impulses with the original objects, working with the multiple enables me to let go of the pieces and spread them throughout the community. By working with the memories of other people I am creating a physical representation of collective recollections, while investigating how a variety of people, who differ in gender, age, race, neighborhood, sexual identity, income, and education, all relate to the objects that populate their memories, and cope with the fact that there is no way to truly return home. Podcast Tour with Kay HealyYou'll see bellow is a variety of images that Kay Healy and I talk about. Next to each image is an audio file. This file corresponds with the image. Healy gives us an artist tour directly about that piece of work. The text around the images are transcribed "highlights" of that interview section. (Just in case you are unable to listen in.)
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Coming Home \\ 2012 \\ Screen printed, stuffed and sewn fabric
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Coming Home \\ 2012 \\ Screen printed, stuffed and sewn fabric
“...I interviewed Leroy, Peggy, Frank and Kim… I asked all of them to describe their childhood homes in as much detail as possible. I did about three interviews per person… I then drew those images life size, transferred them on to screens and then screen print them onto fabric and then sew and stuff them. I made four rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a dining room and a living room, and each one combines their stories….”
“The kitchen has, Franks ceiling fan, Peggy’s wallpaper, Kim’s grandmother’s stool and phone… and Leroy’s refrigerator… So each of the objects has some sort of connection or story and I combined each room, so it’s objects from each person, so there is this universal quality to this idea and this concept of where we come from; our origin stories.” “ It was at the airport for 9 months. It was really great, all my friends would take pictures of themselves in front of it whenever they would fly somewhere. |
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Or when I would fly somewhere I would just go and hang out before my plane ride and watch other strangers taking photos of it, or completely ignoring it which happens too.”
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“I had been teaching that semester and I took my students to the library… I met up with the woman who runs the book arts department there and she said … You know we are trying to do more art within the library and would I be interested in doing a group show in the space. I said I would love to see it… I saw the space and I thought ‘ I don’t want to do a group show, I want to do my own show, like this is amazing’. It was one of those moments, where it is instant. I knew the aesthetic that I wanted. I had this idea of working high, of making row homes, that you could look into, like they were dollhouses.”
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“This project also took two years and while I worked on it, I had a submission box in the library. It said, “Submit your story” and it described a little bit of what I was hoping for and I got a lot of submissions that way! I was also having a number of exhibitions… and I had submission boxes there two. It would just say something simple, like ‘Have you ever lost an object that you wish you still had. Please describe the object and how you lost it and why it was meaningful to you…’ " |
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“After finishing Lost and Found and Coming home… I felt that I needed a little break, not from art making, cause I don’t know how to do that but just from this type of work. I had been working with interviews for a long time. I felt like I needed something a bit more immediate and a bit more personal.”
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“ One big influence for this work was that I started developing work for an exhibition in Tokyo Japan. It was very freeing cause Philadelphia is a pretty small art community and very close knit, very positive, very supportive. But you get know for doing a certain thing. I had been doing life size screen prints of furniture for 8 years, so that’s what people knew of me doing. You’d like to think you are free to do whatever you want. But there is something comforting about sticking to what you know. I thought, Japan is an audience who’s never seen my work, and will probably never see it again, so if I’m going to take some risks, this is the moment.” |
“I’ve been thinking a lot about imperfection and allowing imperfection... I always have this outside goal. ‘It needs to look like this’ and I’m just trying to get there as much as possible. It always feels like it comes a little bit short of that. There’s this other way of working which is really new to me, where it’s like ‘Maybe it does look this way, maybe it doesn’t’...”
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“...These are about my best friend who lives pretty close to me. Last year she was walking home from the gym, at 8:30 at night, and a man punched her from behind and knocked her out. Her jaw was shattered in two places and her tooth was shattered… I was three blocks away when the police called from her phone. I answered the phone and I was like, “Heeeyyyyy”. They were saying, “This is the Philadelphia police department.’ My stomach just dropped...” “...The first one, on the left, is his view. That’s me imagining what he saw when he was about to do it. ‘Cause I really can’t wrap my mind around ‘I’m going to hurt this person who I don’t know’ The Pile is when they called me, what I imagined… Then the one to the right where she is reaching out, that is what actually happened… There was this very electric moment when I ran there and there were all these police and ambulances and other people, and then through the crowd there was her, and she was upright... ” |
Emmy: Real // 2016 // Stuffed and sewn cotton, H & M sweatshirt, fishing line
"... in Reach, that is her actual sweatshirt ... and again it's another mundane object that has so much power..." |
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“I’ve always had this connection to the idea of home and how we are forced through life to change and those who have had the extreme of that… I was listening to a number of podcasts and one of them described the Japanese internment camps and I was just blown away. I know it’s a larger part of the curriculum in California but I’m from New York and it was covered in like one paragraph on WWII…”
