LM: In Rainbow Bruise, you begin with casually found objects. What physical pieces of daily life did you bring in and what were the considerations?

KM: The source material for the intaglio prints are all kinds of unfolded, thin cardboard boxes; Kleenex boxes, rubber gloves, cosmetics, 6-pack of beer, electronics.My interest in them originated during the COVID period of the outside world often coming to us via the mail. But for years I had noticed that unfolded boxes often look like figures or effigies. The shapes have a sort of ancient future aesthetic. 

LM:Can you speak to the physical creation of each piece?

KM: There are two bodies of work in this show; Intaglio prints made on an etching press, and larger photographic reliefs, which are embossed black and white photograms which I paint with fabric dye. These two types of images share a visual language of symbolic shapes that refer to the curves of the female body, but also have the crisp dye-cut edges of manufactured objects.  The series Life Hack is made up of intaglio prints of unfolded cardboard packaging, which I have trimmed slightly to coax out figurative shapes. Tabs, holes and flaps become nipples, orifices and wide hips. I apply ink directly to these modified boxes and print them using an etching press. These images, which evoke both ancient effigies and robotic beings are then studies for the larger photograms. Using that same lexicon of forms, I cut these shapes out of materials that have a texture or thickness to them: leather, fake snakeskin, vinyl, oldpaintings and fabric. I arrange these forms in a sort of temporary collage, on the bed of a large etching press. Working in darkness I emboss this into the surface of silver gelatin photographic paper, then cast grazing light across the resulting texture. I add pattern and depth by casting shadow forms onto the paper. I develop these large, textured photograms in the darkroom. Once dry, apply color by painting them with vivid fabric dye and using resist to mask areas of the image. 

I developed this technique for making black and white photographic reliefs several years ago while working with patterns in the landscape such as tree rings and cracks in concrete, which I would hand emboss into the photo paper.I later brought the process indoors and began using an etching press to emboss embroidered fabric into photo paper. In this new work, instead of relying on found objects from nature or material culture, I am inventing my own forms to imprint and those become the underpaintings that I then build on. 

LM: You seem to be guiding these pieces into existence, taking them through developmental stages while also meeting them with a sense of wonder and discovery.  Is there a maternal component to making this work? 

KM: I tend to work in collaboration with materials (both the subject and the medium) and it is the capabilities and limitations of these materials which steers my creative choices. This is not unlike parenting I suppose. Despite what your intentions are for a day or an experience, you have to meet your kid where they are at in that moment and work within their capacity. Often, it’s really limiting and other times it can lead to something unexpected and wonderful. Parenting requires a surprising amount of spontaneous creativity and of course constantly letting go of attachment you your own agenda. 

I think the maternal or feminist aspect of this work is the lens through which I am seeing these unfolded boxes and bits of consumer packaging. It is partly my experience of motherhood that is generating a need to find symbols and icons of femininity that are deeper, truer, weirder and more timeless than the ones our culture commonly offers us. Can the ways our bodies transform, stretch, grow and shrink over time be understood as a power to shape-shift, rather than as decline or decay? 

LM: If the boxes could speak, what would they say about their metamorphosis?

KM: Hopefully they would feel liberated. I think of the intaglio prints of these figures as imagined artifacts that were hiding in plain sight. Then the large photographic reliefs, which hold many more layers and colors, are those same figures animated into their fullest form. Like the difference between a small icon of a deity that you can hold in your hand vs the living form it takes on in mythology. I am aware that there is a good dose of magical thinking in this approach. I’m considering archeology as a paradigm for making art and then I am inventing what I would like to find, making what I need to see, so that I can witness it. Hopefully someone else needs to see it too. 

LM: I see continuities and divergences between Rainbow Bruise and your earlier work featured in Witness Mark.  What relationship do you see between the older and more recent series? 

KM: In my past work I was sort of a purest and the work in my book has an elegance that reflects that. I tended to separate the techniques I use and apply each one to a different subject matter. This approach feels too sanitized now and doesn’t communicate the messiness of my experience. In the last couple of years, I have intentionally dissolved those boundaries and begun to think of every technique as just another tool in my toolbox. The result is that my most recent work is very layered, entangled, and the process is almost indecipherable to a viewer. In addition to granting me a lot of aesthetic freedom, this hopefully steers the focus toward the content rather than the process. Another shift is that I am inventing my own subjects rather than relying on found objects or textures in nature or the built environment.  But even with all these changes, I am still commited to photography’s special ability to render detail and represent evidence in a way that no other medium can. Photography’s historical relationship to truth runs deep. And at the core of my art practice, is my love affair with light and shadow, detail and imperfection and the way light sensitivity records those things. 

LM: In Witness Mark, you include a 1997 journal entry about your own maturing female form and the sometimes powerful, sometimes deeply uncomfortable, experience which sexuality holds. With Rainbow Bruise the audience is invited to see the breast transformed by time, by motherhood. What is the place of strength and femininity within your work?

KM: Yes, I wrote about my relationship to beauty and about discovering the darkroom as a kind of sanctuary both from what I now understand is sensory overload and also from the gaze and judgement of others. I found that darkness allowed me to feel embodied in a way that I can’t when I’m visible. 

Pina Bausch, one of my all-time favorite artists in any medium said “Your fragility is also your strength”.  I live by this and tend to think the most interesting artwork is made when we lean into the parts of ourselves that feel most shaky, tender and unstable. It’s not just about showing vulnerability, but rather about turning toward the awkward, unresolved, messy areas of our experience because those are the juiciest parts of the story.  Despite my scrappiness, I’m kind of a girl’s girl and I seek out sisterhood with other women as a foundation for daily life. I think there has been a visible femininity to my work even long before I began making figurative images.  The colors, patterns and found objects I’ve worked with have often referred to common experiences of womanhood or to feminine archetypes in mythology, which have a potent mix of power and softness. 

LM: When you imagine this work being viewed in the future, what empathy do you hope people will have for the current moment?

KM: If am optimistic, I hope that this era is looked back on as a cautionary tale about the risks of apathy and greed. That would imply that things do get better. As a parent, optimism is sort of a biological imperative. Part of my interest in the distant past and future, in seeing things within a context of deep time, is that it helps me remember the ebb and flow and find a long optimism for my descendants. I also find of course that there is something very hopeful and appealing about the idea of information being embedded in objects and images to communicate across generations. I want to participate in that, both in deciphering the past and in transmitting to the future via art. I would hope that my work might express a desire to adapt, to weave together the past and the future into images that can hold both.