Artifacts of

The assembly of sentimentality

Everything kept, everything held. I want to tell you about my relationship with artifacts.

If there is anything life in the last several years has put me in touch with personally, it is my unrelenting sentimentality. Lately, a very precious feeling has been coming in strong waves in select moments; it’s both explosively joyful and devastating, all in one checked and balanced swirl.

The feeling is the delicacy of the present moment.

The vibratory bliss/ache of being fully aware that I am alive in this body in this timeline right now also brings with it the reminder of impermanence and death. It isn’t morbid, it’s the opposite. To live with awareness of mortality inadvertently causes more fullness and vibrancy in living.

Each micro moment is fleeting, fleeting, fleeting. If you open up and stay quiet you can actually see it with your eyes. Beginning and ending in a rapid succession of momentary births and deaths is an ongoing flickering of cyclical luminance. I am in a perpetual state of deep and vast appreciation for life so overflowing, as I witness the flowers bloom and fall, I witness my child grow, I witness the season change each day, I witness.

I notice myself always paying attention to and celebrating what each present moment leaves behind. It could be a physical fragment I can hold in my palm, a distillation of felt experience that stays in my heart, or a photographic memory that fires off every once in a while. Not all of them are deep and profound. I equally love the dirt covered pistachio shell I found near the kid’s playground and the random bead that falls out of someone’s pocket.

I find a lot of beauty in the practice of appreciating these things. There is nothing I can do to stop myself from appreciating them, so I have to deal with living in such unstoppable appreciation. I’ll learn to keep living in this way. I do not apologize in advance, or ever, for the unbearableness of this I may bring to others.

All of experience, both internal and external, is always distilled into a residual keepsake of one kind or another, if we open our eyes to it all.

A temporary artifact collage

I have come to believe these fragments, these keepsakes, can all be sacred. A dried funeral flower vs. the burnt incense stick. Earth ocher from a site of spiritual significance vs. the mud from the street on the bottom of my shoe. A delicate seed pod vs. a packet of silica gel beads. Precious pigment distilled from the plant dye vs. the crushed brick I found in the river. A meaningful experience vs. a random memory. What does it mean to appreciate these things equally? To love them? To display them? To decide what to keep and what to compost?

◯

While using plant and mineral pigments in my practice, the sentimentality around artifact appreciation that has always been there started to really reveal itself as I related to each pigment as a smaller essence left behind from any color-bearing being. I started to see artifacts everywhere, in unexpected places. All of them feel like art.

The word artifact comes from the latin roots arte (skill or craft) and factum (a thing made). It literally translates to something crafted with skill. The connotation of artifact has evolved to not only mean just a crafted object, but one that holds memory. Artifacts are objects, remnants, traces, imprints. Not just crafted by human hands, but by the divine and skillful hands of nature-god-universe. Each small fragment holds its larger story. Artifacts are both material and nonmaterial.

That is my heart-on-fire-fueled spiel.

New work: Artifacts of

This series of new work is a display of crafting personal ritual to both see and honor artifacts within and around me.

Artifacts of, twenty-four 5x5 inch mixed media collages and paintings, April 2025

From left to right:

Red earth on green earth
Pinecone on wood
Gold dot on charcoal
Tulip on soil
Ochre on terra cotta
Memory on square
Charcoal, seed, leaf, mica, pollen
Seeds with blue
Backbending on egg shells
The number 10
Partial memory under charcoal
Partially eaten strawberry on cotton
Perception on darkness
Burnt out on canvas
Pollen on blue
Scrap on square
Seeds on pods
Dandelion on wood
Marigold gone to seed on wood
Fragments on paper
Silica gel on wood
Clays on white
Incense on wood
Rose petal on charcoal

A closer view

Up until now, most of my art practice has involved painting and ink. What led me to expand into collage was the experience of looking at all of the little bits around my studio that I save because of their beauty and reminder. My question for myself was - what happens if I expand around the pigments, and use the raw materials themselves too? Immediately, the flower seeds, pollen, leftover paints and studio scraps from prior projects, strips of cut canvas, shapes and thoughts in my mind, all started to present themselves as art materials.

Each and every material used in Artifacts of is a part of something bigger, kept, repurposed, never itself bought. In other words, it’s all made from upcycled materials from around me and in my studio. The only purchase was the blank wooden panels.

Another closer view

Creating these pieces was a great opportunity for me to explore a lot of new techniques, textures, combinations, experiments, adhering methods, layering, and risk-taking was easy because the whole process felt so forgiving and playful.

Working with each material felt like a process of:

1. Seeing it

2. Recognizing it

3. Celebrating it

4. Co-creating with it

5. Displaying it

There is something about giving each trace and scrap its proper little moment that felt like a collaboration in expression and attention that transformed something that could be seen as mundane into something to be appreciated.

Closing reception, Sunday, April 27 3-6 pm

This series is on display at Sometimes Space, a gallery project in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

The address is 306 W Cross St. If you are local, I would absolutely love to see you there!

In the meantime, I wonder if you will notice artifacts in your own experience?

Thank you for being here and for viewing/reading! I am about to eat lunch and then take a walk by the river, it is SO insanely nice out today, Spring has finally popped off around here, and it is giving me so much life.

I hope you have a life-filled day too,

♡ -Kristen