Kathryn Rodrigues

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Mary Oliver, Upstream

Growing up in a military family, I have repeated the process of disassembling, moving, reassembling and acclimating my home, community and sense of self across different countries, contexts and cultures. This pattern has led me to feel most at home when I am transitioning between layered states and identities. Due to both my Portuguese family heritage and the experience of living in three Lusophone countries, I feel a deep connection to saudade, a Portuguese word considered untranslatable, that denotes a nostalgic remembrance of certain people, places or things, absent or forever lost, accompanied by the yearning to see or possess them once more. I am fascinated by the ambiguity of simultaneous belonging and longing, separation and closeness, the known and unknown. The focus, time and resources I pour into my work all serve as tools for remembering, honoring and understanding my past and present.

The series “Homesick” examines the contrast between my transient, international childhood and current life in the suburbs. As a primary caregiver of young children, the majority of my time over the last several years has been spent at home which can often feel isolating. Simultaneously, I was reckoning with putting down roots for the first time. These feelings were only amplified once the pandemic began.

I began a series of self-portraits taken in my yard and around the exterior edges of my house. I explored the intersection of interior and exterior spaces, using my body as a cartographic tool for delineating and transgressing edges and boundaries. I physically connected with the landscape and objects, using gestures inspired by contemporary dance as a way to transcend and be in relationship with the environment. I chose to only show fragments of my body in each image to retain autonomy and control over what is hidden and what is revealed and to have the viewer serve as a witness to the deep exploration and attention I am giving the space.

These images capture the dichotomy of my liminal moments of freedom outdoors while also remaining restricted to our property, moments I spent alone but also in plain sight of my children and neighbors, longing for connection but also for the security of separation.

These works are from a series of mixed media collages that explore ideas connecting familial lineage, motherhood, the body as landscape, memory and mortality. As a middle-aged person raising young children and navigating aging parents and grandparents, essential questions arise: what do we carry from previous generations consciously and unconsciously? What do we pass on to our children? How do we stay connected and remember family members who have passed away? What memories do we retain and which memories fade away?

Living in the era of commercial DNA testing, I began to explore my maternal and paternal DNA information along with my own. I became enthralled with investigating my family’s geographic ancestry as well as the visualization of my chromosome map. I meticulously traced this map onto vellum, using the drawing as a negative and rendering multiple black and white photograms, further abstracting an abstraction of my identity. I made gelatin plate monoprints on vellum using parts of my body to create ink impressions and stencils from fragments of family portraits, pulling multiple prints from each plate and disintegrating and degrading the images with each subsequent print into patterns resembling cellular or biologic visualizations. Some of these monoprints I used to make additional photograms, while others I kept in their original state. From this volume of photograms and prints I used fragments to create layered, dreamlike landscapes. Each collage contains snippets of facial profiles, body prints, and the DNA code from myself and my family members, aggregating into a sort of personal iconography. This process of selecting, cutting and arranging these forms has been both profoundly meditative and gratifying. In combining abstractions of my most intimate and specific imagery with classical landscape motifs, I continue to investigate the intersection of the interior and exterior, the psychological and physical.

As a primary caregiver of young children, the majority of my time is spent at home. This can sometimes feel isolating and mundane, but beginning in the late afternoon through the early evening hours our house becomes a repository for light reflections, refractions and shadows. The ghostly patches of light always take on different and fleeting forms and the imagery morphs minute by minute before disappearing abruptly. These ephemeral images appear at a time when everyone is tired, hungry and lacks self-control, providing a transitory respite from the micro-necessities of daily life and the macro-anxieties of the outside world, and facilitating a connection to the curiosities of nature and the creative spirit.

The title of the series refers to both the historic, literary meaning of “The Witching Hour” as the time of night, usually between 12-3am, when the spirit world is at its most active as well as the contemporary meaning that parents of young children use to refer to the hours just before bedtime when children are at their most chaotic and intense. By choosing to photograph using medium format film, I create space and time to slowly investigate and compose these images. In some, the texture of a wall or a small chip of paint is the only aspect suggesting an object or sense of place, thereby juxtaposing the ethereal and the ordinary. This ongoing series explores the urge to find and document these fleeting but sublime moments of discovery, mystery, whimsy and hope.

This series is both an investigation of, and a reflection on, the collection of experiences and memories that have shaped my identity thus far. By the time I was beginning high school, my family had moved ten times in 5 different countries. This transient lifestyle left me with a deep interest in geography, travel, landscapes, family history and cultural identity.

I see maps as being the intersection of these subjects. They are able to reflect both home and abroad, the known and unknown, separation and closeness, belonging and longing. It is precisely this ambiguity that intrigues me. By referencing both visual and symbolic aspects of maps, I have recreated the process of investigating what and where I have come from.