Off the Walls

Artist Kerry Kilburn’s 18” x 20” canvas “My Mother’s Pearls” from 2018, Digital Photograph 

MY MOTHER’S PEARLS

Welcome to CVUU’s virtual art show, “Off The Walls,” the brainchild of our Arts and Walls Committee.

Each month we feature a new artist. For October, “Off the Walls” is exhibiting the talent of Chesapeake-based photographer Kerry Kilburn.

Kerry Kilburn came to the east coast by way of Washington, California, New Mexico, and West Virginia, earned a Ph.D. in biology, and accumulated over twenty years of experience as a college professor along the way. After retiring, she began taking art classes to improve her photography, a subject that had long fascinated her. She quickly discovered an unexpected passion for art history and pursued dual degrees – a BA in art history and a BFA in photography. She completed her BA in the spring of 2018, emphasizing Renaissance and Baroque art, writing her senior thesis on Late Renaissance painter Lavinia Fontana.

The themes in Kerry’s photography are informed by her biology background and her entering her seventh decade of life. Her work deals primarily with the broad theme of time as it relates to life and death cycles and its role in the development of memory and history. She has shown her work in juried shows locally in Norfolk, Suffolk, Williamsburg, and Newport News and regionally in Tennessee and South Carolina.

Kerry completed her BFA in photography in the fall of 2019. She plans to continue developing her skills and making art for as long as possible. She believes that learning to make, appreciate, and talk about art has helped her grow intellectually, creatively, and emotionally.

Artist Statement for “My Mother’s Pearls”

With my sixtieth birthday, I began a year of deep introspection. The relationships in my life had been an important subject of reflection, and I decided to use my photography to actively engage with the complex, often difficult relationship I had with my mother, who passed fourteen years ago. Using a combination of items I inherited from her and objects I’ve collected over the years, I created vignettes that both recall specific memories and emotions and also illustrate the journey I have taken in my understanding of my mother, her life, and the influences that made her the woman she was. I kept the vignettes simple and removed them from any specific context by placing them on black backgrounds. In this way, I invite the viewer to find the universal and particular meaning in each image and the series as a whole.

Although I began this work to portray a relationship I thought I understood and had come to terms with, I found my purpose shifting as the work progressed.

Now I am asking two questions. First, how do my childhood memories work? What artifacts evoke, what form do they take, and how reliable are they? And, as I reawaken memories I haven’t thought about in years, how is my understanding of my mother changing, and how is that changing perception changing me?


All images and artwork shared in “Off the Walls” are strictly copyrighted by the artist and may not be reproduced or copied.