Kristina Penhoet

For “When We are They are Us,” the artist and women of her community created strands of the work from a variety of donated, reclaimed, and recycled textile materials, each piece representing a woman’s fertility. These teenagers, young women, middle-aged mothers, and grandmothers offered their time, effort, and thoughts about their bodies and their choices. While one type of choice might come immediately to mind for some people, in speaking with these women, the artist realized how many important life choices revolve around decisions of childbearing: education, professions, housing, partnerships, and friendships, to name a few. This universality of experience is expressed in the easily executed fiber technique of crochet, as a way of connecting many women across generations. Just as many of us know someone who has crocheted, we also know someone who has experienced challenging choices related to their fecundity.

This series uses a neutral palette to create a subtle sense of fading and distant memories. Details may soften and change with time; what remains is an emotion. Each piece urges us to understand and find beauty in the quiet moments that make us human and is created through felting, hand-stitching, wrapping, and knotting by hand.

An installation that questions, through the repetitive creation and placement of abstracted forms, the regard with which we respect each other in our current environment. How many more will be abandoned, forgotten, suffer, and die before we reframe our understanding?

That which identifies us cannot define whom we become, just as abstractions of fingerprints become unimagined landscapes.

This series represents the malignant growth and disturbances that occur through lies and obfuscation.

2016-Present

The inspiration for this series comes from the idea that we are all, literally and figuratively, connected to one another. Through portraiture of the navel (the literal connection to our mothers as well as the disconnection to become solely ourselves), I examine the similarities and differences of our connections. While everyone has one, the form of each bellybutton is unique: created by spontaneous actions, thoughtful decisions, gravitational pull, and time.

As both our connection and disconnection, the bellybutton shares another duality. Located upon one of the most vulnerable places of our bodies, the bellybutton is very intimate, but without the overt sexual connotations of genitalia. Whether and how we choose to reveal our bellybuttons depends greatly on our socio-cultural norms, the company we keep, our age, and our opinion of ourselves. While exposing our "soft underbelly" can be provocative, it can also be frightening, offensive, mundane, or silly. In this work, I chose to isolate the bellybutton to complement these dualities and to allow for appreciation of the variability of the forms as miniature landscapes. 

Where boundaries and borders begin…

202 Music and Arts Festival

Installation

Washington, DC