Kelly Taylor Mitchell

Lives and works in Atlanta, GA, USA

Artist statement

My practice encompasses orality and ancestral memory, both real and imagined, woven into the fabric of the Africana Diaspora. My artistic process is ancestor worship, centering a reverence for spiritual technology and lineal craft. My work and research are deeply invested in labor intensive making, slowness, and home-spun passed down processes. Familial oral histories function as a medium in my work in tandem with printmaking, papermaking, book arts, and textiles. My current work is linked to ancestral ties in the American South, specifically The Great Dismal Swamp (NC / VA), Mitchell Place (Garysburg, NC), Nansemond and Weapemeoc land, and Gee's Bend (AL), Muscogee land. These sites are hereditary origin points. In my work, stories look like fragmented and patched familial archival materials and found objects; or like raw materials that transform earth into ceramic beads and braided bowls; or like foraged river cane and kudzu processed into paper pulp. I mine memory utilizing speculative histories and “rememory”, the act of recalling the forgotten, as authored by Toni Morrison. My practice references and constructs mythologies that find their roots in marronage, Sankofa, masquerade, and protective gestures of the Diaspora.

Artwork