Claire Kessler-Bradner

clairekesslerbradner.com | @ckb_studio

Quiet moments of the monumental: Claire Kessler-Bradner captures the subtle hum of anxiety and guilt that many experience at a safe distance from the wildfires.

Woodcut print from 2009, Text from September 9th, 2020

Claire Kessler-Bradner Artist Statement:

I made this print over ten years ago as part of a series of unmade bed abstractions. At the time I was exploring making images of my everyday household environment, bins of tangled laundry and fragments of crumpled blankets, enjoying the dissonance of creating something almost unrecognizable from a photographic, realistic source image. I ultimately printed nine of these squares in a large grid, which I have hung in my home studio space, where I don't pay it much attention, perhaps because it comes from what feels like a lifetime ago, and forward seems to be the only acceptable direction to move in my art practice.

On September 9th, 2020, my family woke to notice the yellow sky, which darkened progressively to a deep rusty orange-red, creating an otherworldly night midday. I taught four art classes over Zoom that day, all with the print hanging right above my workspace, but I gave it no thought as I tried to keep the kids on the screen feeling steady and seen through the unnameable thing we were all experiencing. It wasn't until days later that I noticed how perfectly the colors of the crumpled blankets matched the strangeness of the outdoors that day, how they looked like landscapes of dried hills suffocating under the smokey skies. A prediction, perhaps, from a time before this cycle of autumn trauma was normal.