Kayla White
For me, painting has become a way to seek understanding and an attempt to anchor myself in my time and environment. However, as I and my surroundings are always changing it remains an impossible shifting task.
Primarily working from photographs of homesteading ancestors ,and my own farming and backcountry images, my paintings explore the deep rooted practices of working with the land. I explore the stories that are handed down from one generation to the next, like invisible threads that connect us. The imagery in my work reflects history and community and the way they are tied together through time and space.
The incomplete picture, the shifting perspective, and the strangely saturated colors reveal beauty in the small moments, which also distorts the overall image. I seek to capture the feeling of being lost in the energy of the present and only with some distance and perspective does the viewer gain clarity within the work. In this way my painting reflects my attempt to orient myself within my own personal history and the land that my family has cultivated for six generations.
My work is the constant struggle between history and nostalgia, the mundane and the optimism of the new.