Artist Statement - Milk Diaries
It almost feels like I have spent the past two years in isolation. I’ve been consistently trying to navigate my artistic practice through intense waves of grief over the loss of my mum, infertility/miscarriage, and a fear of dying. Within three months of my daughter being born, the pandemic began. Along with postpartum anxieties, healing associated with childbirth, obsessive tracking of my baby’s feeds, breastfeeding struggles, we were faced with the unknowns around COVID 19. Will my baby be okay? What if my baby gets sick? What about check-ups? Am I feeding my baby enough? What if my milk dries up and I can’t feed my baby? What if I get sick and can't feed my baby? Am I spending adequate time with my oldest child?
As a way to ease my anxieties, I started pumping breast milk. I would pump at 5:00 every morning before or after our first feed. I began writing thoughts or worries along with the date on each bag of breastmilk. I would then photograph the bags of breastmilk as a way to document life postpartum, anxieties about mumhood and life in COVID19. The act of pumping breastmilk and freezing it was a ritualistic and meditative way for me to cope and ease anxieties around getting sick and not being able to feed my baby.
Postpartum anxieties are exacerbated by the times we are living in.
Biography
Kasie Campbell is an award-winning visual artist working on Treaty 6 Territory. In 2015, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in Sculpture at the University of Alberta. Campbell’s work integrates a variety of media including sculpture, photography, and installation with performative means.Themes of the abject and simultaneous tensions around beauty and the grotesque surrounding the female body have been major points of interest in her work.
Notably, Campbell has exhibited her work throughout Canada and internationally at Grounds for Sculpture (south of NYC), Mana Contemporary in Hamilton, NJ, Mana Contemporary inChicago, IL, New York City at the Westbeth Gallery, Viljandi, Estonia and more recently in a group show titled The Scene at the Art Gallery of Alberta.
