Kaylan in her converted garage studio in Fort Wayne, IN, 2022
About
Kaylan Buteyn’s work investigates physical representations of generational care through paintings, quilts, domestic textiles, abstraction and collage. She has exhibited in galleries and community spaces internationally including the Ground Floor Gallery in Nashville, TN, Artlink in Fort Wayne, IN, Split Milk in Edinburgh, Scotland, among others. In 2019, as a social extension of her art practice, Kaylan founded the Artist/Mother Podcast, sharing interviews of working artists who are mothers. The podcast community has grown to a more inclusive state, and now exists as the Thrive Together Network, a community of female identifying, non-binary and trans artists that offers support and encouragement through exhibitions, retreats, a crit group program and more. In 2020 as a response to the global covid-19 pandemic, Kaylan co-founded Stay Home Gallery with Pam Taylor and the two took their virtual gallery physical when Kaylan offered her home and artist studio in rural Tennessee as a brick and mortar gallery and artist residency space. Kaylan holds an MFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art. She now lives with her partner and their 3 children in Fort Wayne, IN.
Artist Statement:
The art I make functions as portals; linking people, places and perceptions. I believe materials hold memory and through my art practice I investigate physical representations of generational care. My process is multi-faceted including quilting, sewing, painting, dying, gluing, stitching and more; creating layered compositions often stretched as paintings, built up on panels, or installed as hanging quilts. I include domestic textiles from my Grandmother’s generation that root the work in the past but I combine them with the language of paint and abstraction in a modern way. Bold color and heavily applied paint juxtaposes ripped, faded and torn fabric. The work serves as an investigation of knowing, of rooting, of finding – myself, my memories, my mother, aunts and grandmothers. How can one life deteriorate as another begins? How do generations intertwine and intersect? Can color and fabric combine in ways that reflect notions of our future and past selves? How do beings exist in overlapping segments of time and space, like textiles collaged or sewn together, old and new? I am cultivating a collective knowing, a continual conversation, and investigating my generational legacy through craft, textile, paint and collage.
