Terra Keck
Terra Keck is an image-maker and performer based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and her BFA from Ball State University. She co-hosts the comedy-educational podcast “Witch Yes!” and is a founding member of the international artist collective GRRIC. Her work is featured in Oxford American Art, Colossal Magazine, It’s That Nice, and in permanent institutional collections in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Hawaiʻi, and California. Her work was recently featured in a solo exhibition at Spring Break Art Show curated by Field Projects and she will be having her Mexico City debut this fall at Maia Contemporary Gallery.
Collect Bean: What is the kindest thing someone can tell you about your work?
Terra Keck: From the comments I get, I feel like my ideal viewers are sensitive and poetic people. I love it when they talk about how my work reminds them of safe, calming, or special moments. For example, I was told once that my work reminded someone of “falling asleep with their head in their mom’s lap as a little kid.” Another time, I was told my work reminds someone of “seeing a friend after a long time.” So, it’s nice when people tell me they like it or think it’s pretty, but when it helps others express themselves, I know I’m on the right track.
Collect Bean: Tell us about a time when you felt you found your groove as an artist.
Terra Keck: I always know I’m not in a good place with my studio practice when thinking about what other people want. I remember being so frustrated in graduate school in Hawaiʻʻi that I wasn’t getting positive feedback. I was listening to everything they were telling me! I was reading all the books they told me to read, and I thought I was executing their expectations perfectly.
I’m not sure why or what caused it, but I had some kind of fracture occur inside me late in my second year. It happened in whatever part of my brain housed what needed the work to “make sense.” I started making these tiny drawings, and for the first time in years, making work felt easy. It felt “alchemical,” a word I like to use to sound serious instead of “magical.” When I finish, I just let them be done without the need for judgment or purpose.
When I brought them to critique, I got used to saying in front of people, “Hey, I made this thing. And I’m unsure why or what it’s about, but I want to discuss it.” And it was like a switch! People were responding to my work.
I think that in academia, we’re pushed to have the idea come before the making—almost like you’re viewing your work as a product, ordered off a website, waiting to be delivered. But I firmly believe that the idea reveals itself through the making. You write the poem as it’s being written. That’s where the joy is. That’s where the discovery is. And anytime I catch myself putting the idea before the art, I know it’s just me trying to please some made-up committee in my brain. If I’m busy doing that, I won’t be truly present in the studio where it counts.
Collect Bean: How does your painting process look like from start to finish?
Terra Keck: My current body of work is made of eraser drawings, which means they’re made by removing material I’ve built up on the surface of my drawing.
I start by cutting and adhering BFK, a tough, textured printmaking paper, to a pre-made wood panel. I let those sit for about 24 hours underneath heavy wood and books. When I trust that the adhesive has cured, I pull out the covered panels, trim down the sides, and hang them on my walls as blank canvases. Then I stare at them and think, “Wow, I’m being so productive.”
About once a week, I’ll prepare the paper by building up layers of graphite. For a long time, I was creating layers by slowly filling in the picture plane with HB pencils, but as I scaled up, the time it took to do that kept me from working through ideas at the pace I needed. So, about four months ago, I started using layers of graphite powder that I rub on with paper towels or my hand. During this process, I wore a mask and safety glasses because I sneezed and coughing up graphite.
Once the paper has uniform dark ground, I’ll build up a watercolor wash of muted blues, greens, and pinks. Sometimes, I feel like I’m making a wash for a specific idea at this step, but that’s all a mirage. By the time I’m ready to work on any specific panel, that idea will be long gone and off to some other artist. I try to be very intuitive and gentle with my washes so that I have something to respond to, but not too aggressive that it becomes adversarial.
Once the watercolored panels are dry, I’ll hang those up around my studio and live around them, empty and opaque with color and material. I stare at them and pace back and forth, thinking, “Surely, I am being productive now.”
Then, every day, I pull one down and work on it. When it’s time to erase, I’ll put on Ram Dass or an audiobook about a specific esoteric idea I’m interested in, and I’ll play ambient music to seal in this receptive space I’m in. My current go-to musician is Marine Eyes. And I just start erasing.
Sometimes, the image that comes out relates to what I’m listening to, but sometimes it’s alien even to me. The agency of the paper and the ambiguous marks of the erasers leave a lot of room for a Rorschach test approach to image-making. When I feel like I’ve reached a decent composition, I’ll build up more graphite layers to resolve areas. To finish it off, I’ll start playing with where to place these light pinpoints. This is my favorite part. If you’ve ever painted a portrait, you know the rush of placing a single bright highlight on a glimmering eye or a bottom lip.
The process is very loose and improvisational. At this point, I don’t even allow myself to sketch ideas out beforehand because it creates expectations, and expectations have been a total buzzkill for my studio practice in the past.
Collect Bean: Are there any recurring themes or motifs in your art, and if so, what do they represent to you?
Terra Keck: A motif that’s shown up in the past year that I wasn’t expecting is daffodils. Whenever I talk about it, I can see everyone turn into Miranda from The Devil Wears Prada: “Florals? For Spring? Groundbreaking.” But I accidentally fell into this love story with daffodils on a trip to Ireland in May of 2023.
I was riding through the empty Irish countryside on a bus with my family, passing lots of old, dilapidated houses and empty plots of land. As we were driving, our driver explained that many of these plots used to be family homes, but since the famine and the mass exodus from Ireland, they’ve gone unoccupied for generations. Yet, in all of these plots were little outcroppings of daffodils on the edges of where gardens and houses used to be.
At first, I thought, “Oh, that’s cute; how special to be here when the daffodils are blooming.” I didn’t realize that even though we only experience daffodils for two weeks in spring, they can live beneath the soil for hundreds of years in these giant knots called “heritage bulbs.” The bulbs are habituated to where they were planted, so they have a sense of place (you couldn’t take a daffodil bulb from Ireland and put it in Dallas—it’d die dramatically). It was likely that some of the daffodils I saw were planted 100 years ago by people who thought they would be on this land for a long time. You plant geraniums for a season. You plant a daffodil bulb to appreciate the passage of time after a long winter. In this way, daffodils (kind of silly, ridiculous-looking flowers) act as record keepers of where humans felt they had a sense of belonging. They witness us as we witness them in all their iterations (blooming or not).
Through my studio research, I’ve been connecting the motif of the daffodil with my expansion into UFO and consciousness studies—things germinating beneath the surface, hidden patterns and messages waiting to be discovered, and as a way to take these big, heady concepts outside of a human-centric perspective. Because if you take away the hierarchy of bacteria, plants, and animals (and within animal—humanity), would these beings not have an equal interest in all life on this planet? If I were just a giant colony of cells hallucinating the consciousness of an artist in New York, what would the hallucination be like for all the cells that came together to become a daffodil? What is her role in the universe? When she “looks” up at the Milky Way, what does she “see?”
Collect Bean: How do you see your artwork fitting into the larger art world or art history?
Terra Keck: I think stylistically, my work is part of an emerging trend towards “the blur.” Jan Dickey and Anna Gregor recently published a talk discussing this phenomenon of artists whose work isn’t representational and isn’t abstract but exists in a state of recession and emergence. It’s not that the work is noncommittal but that it exists in a transient state. I think of Jen Deluna’s blur paintings or the art world’s recent romance with airbrush, like Katie Hector’s solo at Management in the spring. But I think it goes beyond aesthetics. In my work, I’m responding to the uncertain, nostalgic blur of remembering something that feels like more than a dream and reckoning with the uncertain feelings I have about the future. I’m sure other artists use this visual language to respond to many feelings.
I’m also seeing a lot of other artists who came out of the vaporwave movement from 2016 to 2017 moving into landscape painting. While I don’t necessarily consider my work to be landscape painting, it’s more connected to “land” than ever before, which feels silly to say, living in a walk-up in Brooklyn. I see a lot of artists creating these highly romanticized, divine images of untouched wilderness, which seems to me to be a way of viewing the cosmic smallness of humanity and the vast, unknowable “nature” that we feel so separate from. I think Parker Parrella and Angela Lane are good examples of this. You’ll even see it outside the art world in video compilations of “The Bird That Sounds Like Your Childhood” or images of suburban nostalgia set to the sound of sprinklers. There’s this feeling that we’ve lost connection to something in our digital age, some kind of magic, but it’s not lost forever. It’s been here all along, on the edges of our busy world, waiting for us.
