3D Prints
3D Printed work towards an 'ecological-self'. https://kimberlycallas.com/artist-statement/
Eco-Portrait Masks
These works were are hand painted 3D prints or cast in Winterstone. The 3D prints were featured in “Post-Human: New Media Art 2020” , edited by Leejin Kim and published by CICA press in Gimpo, Korea.
Here is the artist statement included in the book:
I long for an ecological self, a place within us that still remembers we are nature. As a sculptor, I take the body and write into it with nature’s patterns, symbols, and sometimes, prayers. I combine the body with the bee, the mountain, and the flower. As an artist, I work with the body as a place of knowing and I rely on the body as part of the land, the piece of land we always inhabit. The body becomes a place of transformation. If this longing is to be fulfilled, it will come through a spiritual changing of the flesh.
‘Your healing grows outside your door’, I learned from herbalists while working at a sustainability institute. I am intrigued by this magical concept that healing plants grow next to the person that needs them. It speaks of an ecological intimacy that I want to share through my artwork. My new eco-portrait series focuses on the healing power of herbs and other elements of nature. The eco-portrait, Yarrow’s 2nd Sight, is based on the British folkloric belief that pressing yarrow leaf against the eyes gives second sight.
The Eco-Portrait, Root Mouth, started as a 3D scan of one of my youth collaborators. Part of this series combines individual portraits with universal nature symbols and patterns. By joining the personal and universal I want to reveal our kinship with one another and nature. I work between a likeness and abstraction to also emphasize the tension between the personal and the universal – our desire to hold onto our uniqueness with our need to understand ourselves as a vast, interconnected body. This mask uses the symbol of the root combined with the mouth to represent speaking from a deep, tangled place.
The calendula flower is called ‘The Bride of the Sun’ for the way it follows the sun throughout the day like a sunflower. Part of the year, I live in a solar powered house that I built with my husband in Maine. This is one of the reasons Calendula is a major part of my ecological-self apothecary. I used it in my series Four Gates and Guards and it was the flower that began my Circle series. It continues to inspire images and patterns within my artwork. In the Eco-Portrait, Inner Flower, I use a circle pattern discovered in the flower’s center.
The Eco-Portrait, Honey-Eyed, continues this theme. It recalls how honey is used for healing and bringing spiritual insight through the ‘sweet speech’ of prophecy.
For my next series, I’m creating several life-sized figures that become palimpsests of land and seascapes. I’m exploring questions about ‘Embodied Place’ and how place ‘marks us’. This new work considers how our bodies are made up of and hold the memories of the very places we inhabit or have inhabited. What of nature’s patterns remain in us? What memories of home may I bring back to the surface and make visible again? My intent is to remember the ecological self, our significant connections to nature, while also developing meaningful new ones.
Joya Artist-in-Residence, Spain
A selection of artwork created during an eco-art residency in Vélez Blanco, Spain. https://joya-air.org/artist/2019/4/22/joya-air-kimberly-callas-usa
Ocean Body
The Climate Crisis isn’t just a crisis for physical and environmental reasons. It is a cosmological crisis where the world as we know it and our place within it is no longer understandable. It is a crisis of meaning. As scientists and activists are frantically trying to save species, landscapes, and whole ecosystems, many of them will tell you – we have the science, what we need now is a shift in consciousness. We need new meaning.
Through my artwork and social practice, I’m interested in building up a symbolic consciousness so that we can create new belief systems that are healthy and life- sustaining. I bring together specific places, species, or persons, with larger nature-based cultural symbols and archetypes. In my new series, Ocean Body, I call on symbols like Whale, Boat, Moon, Horizon Line, ‘the tree of renewal’ and archetypes like 'the night sea journey'. While I acknowledge the primacy of the ocean in climate regulation and stability, its role as habitat, and the issues of massive plastic waste; I also refer to the ocean as a symbol for the cosmos, and the deep unconscious, the psyche that sometimes tosses up new meaning for us onto the shore
Inspired by historical nautical charts that were hand-drawn and mounted on muslin, I created four large-scale (10’) drawings that indicate psychological journeys, such as the horizon line’s call to the distant shore, and pairs it (through latitude and longitude lines) with the annual migration, from Florida to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, of the critically endangered Northern Right Whales. There are just under 400 Right whales left. My work questions what meaning and wisdom leave as we lose these species.
Throughout the series, I use water-based mediums: dyed fabrics and resists, India ink, and water-soluble graphite to represent the sea as a shared home and journey way. Life-size sculptures and reliefs, that are similar to my earlier work Nurture Me and Inner Flower, will complete this body of work for a solo show. Much of the work was created through an artist-in-residency with Urban Coast Institute, https://www.monmouth.edu/uci/. Additional research was undertaken at The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, https://aras.org.
Selected Sculptures
A quick overview of my sculptures from life size figures to 3D printed eco-portraits.
Small Works for Sale
This collection includes small artworks that are available for sale. These works are created along with my larger sculptures when I am creating a new series. Purchasing these small works helps to fund the larger sculptures. Thank you for helping to support the creation of new work.