Kathryn Rodrigues

Growing up with a father in the military, I learned how to repeatedly disassemble, reassemble, and acclimate my home across five different countries. That consistent relocation created a life shaped by simultaneous belonging and longing—an ambiguity that continues to anchor my artistic practice. 

The series Homesick revisits my relationship to home through the lens of my current life parenting in a Chicago suburb. As I confront the process of putting down roots for the first time, I also encounter the cultural narratives that prescribe what a mother and neighbor should look like. In response, I make performative self-portraits in my yard and around the exterior edges of my house. These images document my attempts to orient my body within the space, transforming everyday objects and landscapes into tools for mapping and redefinition. Using my body as a cartographic instrument, I trace and transgress the boundaries of the environment.

The resulting images embody a spectrum of emotions: dark humor, maternal frustration, yearning, and hopefulness. They reveal both comfort and discomfort, acknowledging the contradictions of domesticity as both refuge and constraint. Ultimately, this work celebrates the moments of rootedness I attempt to build after a lifetime of movement. 

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.