In 2021, I doulaed my grandfather into the afterlife. At his side, I listened for his final breath to join the silence of twilight. That stillness became my approach to painting: not representation, but attendance.
I have questions about legibility and embodiment: how both color and the body are enmeshed, asked to hold more than their capacity, while also being reduced to whatever they can be mined to convey. This position is shaped by Black studies and its search for forms that move before the sign can close around them. Similarly, a substrate is not a site for me to inscribe form onto, but rather a mouth to reach through, calling forth the unseen for as long as I can lose myself in it.
My process is akin to incantation: jostling, pouring, scraping, wiping, and reaching for memories to surface the canvas, constrained by time and limited material means. Under pressure, gravity, and drip, stains form and unform structures, ebbing in and out of fixed shape. I paint to recall that which remains with me. Like the stickiness of honey in the pitch of my grandmother's voice. Or the groan of wooden floors my palms and feet once knew but cannot reach. These memories shape my relationship to color. Warm tones surface only as far as cooler washes permit. A likeness burgeons, then submerges under every layer poured over it. Like palms holding water, recognition glimmers and fails. What remains are fragments, unnamed and self-possessed, still Being.
Kimberly R. Heard is a painter based in New Haven, Connecticut. Her work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, Bread & Salt Gallery, and as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, and is included in the City of San Diego Civic Art Collection. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art and is a 2026 recipient of the Dean's Prize and the 2025 Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship.
Email:
khrdstudio@gmail.com
