Featured MFA: Carrie Phillips Kieser
Our featured first year MFA of this week utilizes print, drawing and thread as media in her art practise: Carrie Phillips Kieser!
Carrie states about her practice: “My work concerns meditations of delicate and complex ecosystems with imagined or perceived boundaries such as ocean shorelines, wilderness areas and lake edges. I think about how these spaces are penetrated and how humankind has entangled ourselves.”
She has recently moved to Nova Scotia from Calgary Alberta where she was working as the executive director of Alberta Printmakers, a non-profit artist-run center dedicated to promoting print media. Within her personal artistic practice, she is concerned with issues around environment and nature, with healing and nurturing, and is interested in language, poetry, and semiotics. She explores these concepts through the media of print, drawing, and thread. Through pursuing her MFA at NSCAD, she is hoping to expand her artistic community, build on bridging print into public spaces, and find collaborative partnerships. In her spare time, she is exploring the waters by learning to sail with her two boys in a tiny 420 sailboat.
If you want to see more of her work, check out our studio visit or go tho her website www.carriephillipskieser.com or Instagram @carrie.phillipskieser
We visited Carrie in Fountain Campus, where she is working in the Printmaking studios and her personal studio in N450!
And like all the others we ask her to tell us about your studio Practice!
Working in the realm of delicate ecosystems, my current work is focused on a particular area in Nova Scotia, the Blue Mountains Birch Cove Lakes Wilderness Area. This area, as with all wilderness areas and nature reserves are important places for their ecological complexity and contributions to the health of the planet. My print practice is a visual expression of the things I am learning from this specific place. Through the development of a series of repeat relief patterns, I am learning the gifts of healing through the native flora that grow here and trying to understand how these images can offer places/ spaces of meditation in other locations. Within a series of copper plate etchings, I am diving into the rich, resilient world of epiphytes and trying to express this in the materiality of delicate gampi tissues and mulberry papers. Many of the etchings are still in the development stage but I am excited about some new possibilities and expressions that are coming out of them.
Do you keep a special object in your studio?
hmmmmm..many special objects, plants and lichens, small sticks and twigs, dried flowers, objects collected from my travels, art pieces from friends, a tea pot and mug and my books.
