STATEMENT OF WORK

KIRSTEN R BATES

In fifty plus years as an artist my work has incorporated a variety of media, including photographs, film, sound and  performance. I continue to explore the four elements: Water, Fire, Air and Earth, as well as the human condition. I have not shied away from using myself or people close to me as subject, or dealing with difficult material. An early piece, Leave Me Alone, explored my suicidal ideation and depression. Our theater group Turmoil chose to present David Wojnarowicz’s Sounds in the Distance monologues for the first time. My current studio practice activates elements of my archive, presenting it in fresh contexts and juxtapositions with new methods and materials, the newly generated work informed by past explorations and concerns.

My family photo archive goes back to daguerreotypes and tintypes, so my awareness of history of people through photographs began as a child. When I interviewed my grandfather in 1975 as he was nearing death, I wanting to know what he felt like as a young person; I was then in my early twenties. The final piece included rephotographs of photographs I had surreptitiously found of him as a young man posed affectionately with other men. In text slides, shown with the rephotographs and contemporaneous photographs of my grandfather,  I posed unspoken questions. In 2022 I created another personal history piece with rephotographs, Nick at 100 done with my then 100-year-old father-in-law, a Holocaust refugee sent to England alone as a teenager who later became a neuroscientist. Both works were projected in non- linear formats.

Open spaces in my work allow for a variety of interpretation. No one, including the critic who interviewed me, grasped that Leave Me Alone, 1975, had anything to do with my contemplated demise or struggles with depression; the collection of letters and documents could have made me a Fluxus member. Once Upon a Garden, 2024, was mounted in a café that serves as an alternative space. One narrative of the work is my domestic violence survival; another is the story of a passionate gardener, safe for the children who would come in and see large close-ups of flowers or write their names in the peat moss of an installation. A more dystopian installation had a quasi- bedroom set and included a vacation picture album of a happy marriage, juxtaposed with serious photographs of weaponry mounted in drawers above child reach, with content a warning.

I continue to work with Earth, making soil healthier and plants grow. Many of these I collect from the wild. Under the rubric Incidents of Travel I am continuing a series of house photographs begun in Haiti, called Cailles Jacmel, and proceeding with Casas Vacias, shot recently in Merida, Yucatan. The concept of home is fundamental to all of us.

December 2025