BRUSHSTROKES

Kelsey’s creations

In these times of global lockdown, domestication is in its prime. For some, this has translated into simple pleasures – black thumbs have turned green, microwave dinners have turned into homemade bread, chore filled Saturdays have turned into selfcare Saturdays.

However, for others domestication has not been as flowery with confinement being accompanied by loneliness, unemployment, financial hardships, claustrophobia and anxiety.

Typically, we’re used to domesticating other species but not so much ourselves. Domestication reveals the artificiality of confinement but within it is an intriguing beauty – one that artist Kelsey Jenkinson Archbold sees as a muse for her paintings.

Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, Kelsey’s work has been exhibited all over the United States – including a permanent installation at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Currently based in Austin, Texas, Kelsey describes her paintings as “illustrative narratives,” which are largely inspired by her love for nature, science and poetry.

Her artistic theme of domestication is intentionally nested within each painting with several of them encompassing a wild and free element captured within the stillness of domicile order.

Kelsey’s painting titled ‘Will You Remember’ portrays a mongoose sitting beside a toppled over glass jar of blue flowers. A pale green wallpaper with white silhouettes of winding trees is behind the mongoose and is a distant echo but still representation of its time in the wild. The glass jar of flowers, clumsily tipped over, serves as a reminder of the disorder that occurs when nature is confined.

The hints of disorder in Kelsey’s paintings appear to be neither good nor bad – they merely exist. One of her most strik

ing paintings features a coral snake and a king snake against a backdrop of what appears to be branches of an apple tree.

With imagery from the story of the Garden of Eden, the painting toys with our perception of and reaction to safety and danger. The markings on the two snakes are a literal play on a popular childhood rhyme intended to help protect one from venomous snakes: “Yellow touching red, you’re dead. Red against yellow can kill a fellow. Red touching black is safe for Jack.”

Paintings of wild animals are typically set against a backdrop depicting their natural habitats. Kelsey uses a backdrop of wallpaper instead to signify domestication. Wallpaper not only serves as a literal depiction of the indoors, the images on the wallpaper depict scenes from the outdoors. However, these images also appear to be domesticated given their stagnant orderly nature.

Kelsey is also known for her paintings of goats. Goats have long been domesticated by humans for farming purposes and yet, they are descendants of wild beasts that once roamed free.

‘Maybe These Days Are Over’ is a painting of a white goat against a backdrop of blue cloudy skies. Although this painting does not feature wallpaper, the sense of domestication is emphasised by the choice of animal as well as the ambiguity of a background that depicts an outdoors environment that may or may not be confined.

It’s a reminder that one can remain domesticated and confined even in a seemingly free environment. It also poses philosophical discussions about surviving in the chaotic, unprotected wild and the refuge found in domestication.

‘Blessed Are The Creature Born’ also portrays a white goat and cloudy skies with the addition of three bees – a conglomeration of symbols that encompass the harmony and unique sense of freedom experienced in certain types of domesticated environments.

Among Kelsey’s paintings of goats is a painting of a black billy goat with majestic horns. Aptly titled ‘What is Loved is Also Feared,’ this painting echoes the sense of fear that one might have in the presence of untamed beauty.

Between the black goat, which is an animal often used to symbolise the devil and the angelic halo around the goat’s face, the painting questions our understanding of love and fear, the sacred and the profane – the nucleus of this mastermind’s creative endeavours.

Typically, we’re used to domesticating other species but not so much ourselves