Klea McKenna
A Spell for Home, 2020

unique photographic relief; photogram of the surface of an antique oil painting on gelatin silver fiber paper, fabric dye.
42”H x 35”W

ARTWORK STATEMENT:

Making art in this era of nested crises has become like casting a spell or divining a path forward. I gather ingredients that are charged by time and human contact and then ask them to interact and perform jobs they were never intended for, hoping for transformation. In darkness, I embossed an antique oil painting into photographic paper using the pressure of my body and an etching press then I cast light across the impression it left. Once developed, the texture of the unraveling canvas and brushstrokes appear in crystalline black and white detail –rendering what once was a painted image as a tactile object. This photographic relief then became the under-painting onto which I applied fabric dye. The shapes create a protective vessel – “A Spell for Home” in a time when we all crave protection. 

Artist Bio:

Klea McKenna is a visual artist who also makes films and writes. Her work has been shown and published internationally. Her photograms are held in several public collections, including SFMOMA, LACMA, Getty Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy art collection, the Mead Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanists Kathleen Harrison and Terence McKenna. Klea lives in San Francisco with her partner and their young children.