cloud collecting #13: Terra Keck
on generating a fertile space for creativity, falling into an intuitive space + looking up and out at a glittering opaqueness
cloud collecting includes 3-question interviews with women and gender-expansive artists discussing their creativity. This week I have the incredible Brooklyn-based image-maker + performer Terra Keck share insights into her unique process. I stumbled upon Terra’s work online and immediately fell in love with her otherworldly pieces created by erasing layers of graphite and watercolor. She often shares her art with an accompanying piece of ambient music, and when she included a song of mine I gasped in glee and reached out to her about being part of this series (with an extra gasp of glee when she said yes).
Terra Keck is an image-maker and performer based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from The University of Hawaii at Manoa 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. You will find her work featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, and Oxford American Arts well as in permanent institutional collections in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Hawaii, 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.
Described by the editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic as “sonograms of a world ready to be born… and brimming the optimism of theosophical insight,” Keck’s work explores the ontology of our universe and consciousness through the metaphor of the UFO. Instead of siphoned through the language of militarism and conspiracy, the work approaches the UFO from the angle that our universe is, at its core, benevolent. The work is created by erasing layers of graphite and watercolor, a reductive process that alludes to the importance of what is left behind and the negative spaces in our cosmic story. Spiritually, the work is generated in response to the broad consensus that the future is canceled. When things feel so uncertain, what are earthlings supposed to do but look up and out at an opaque and glittering emptiness and dream of someone who traveled a thousand lightyears just to catch a glimpse of us?
Best online place to find her: www.instagram.com/herlovelyface
1. Your art is inextricably connected to nature and mysticism and reminds me of a few of my favorite artists-Agnes Pelton and Hilma af Klint. Who are some of the first artists who inspired you to create? And a few current artists who you look up to?
I am honored to be mentioned alongside such two amazing artists. Pelton and Klint are both creatives I return to often and whose personal stories I find to be very inspiring.
As a child, I was enamored with the worlds created by artist and director Hayao Miyazaki. Not only were his narratives filled with a kind of magical maximalism that a 9-year-old could immerse herself in, but he always seemed to place a young girl trying her hardest to be brave at the center of them. Faced with expectations and problems larger than herself, Miyazaki’s characters were strong because of their human weaknesses, and their successes were usually asserted because she refused to give up. This was a character I highly identified with!
As I got older, I fell in love with the artist Kathe Kollwitz, a German expressionist drawer and printmaker who used light and emotive mark-making to evoke anguish and loss, and I imagine she was another woman trying her hardest to be brave in the face of the carnage of World War 1.
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the work of Loren Erdrich, a New York-based painter whose work has a luminosity that I feel I’m always trying to achieve. I also return to the work of the artist Hannah Antalek, whose super-natured paintings feel so out of the world yet at the core of it, of and beyond our time.
2. I love how you pair songs with your art via social media, capturing the emotion of the piece seamlessly. I'm curious what role music has on your art and creativity as a whole?
I feel a bit dull for coming to this realization well into my career as an artist, but my use of music in the studio has been integral to a huge shift I had in my making practice. For most of my career, I kept a sketchbook, and whatever the drawing in the sketchbook was had to look like what I produced. It was a very 1 to 1 relationship to creativity, and it didn’t leave any room for deviation or play.
At the beginning of 2024, I decided I was done with what felt like a production-based studio practice and I would fall fully into an intuitive space. And a big part of that was listening to ambient music, a space I had dipped into from time to time since 2016. I think my first foray into it was by way of vaporwave but I eventually found the drum beat to be too jarring for the studio. I needed something even softer. The music that I pair with my work is 100% the music that I’m listening to in the studio, and I keep a catalog of songs and artists that I feel are tapped into whatever creative entity I’m tapping into. I look for artists who cradle the monkey chatter in my brain just enough to generate a fertile landscape for creativity. I can tell when I’ve been listening to a specific type of ambient music (space hz vs angel hz) a lot when my work shifts to reflect it.
I recently started bringing ambient sound into my gallery exhibitions and it shifts the entire mood of the viewing experience. I’ve found it helps people stay with the work longer, compels them to linger, and connects them emotionally to my headspace.
3. How do you cloud collect (connect to childlike wonder) in your creativity?
When I was a child, I loved astronomy. I was never going to be an astronomer because I find math quite frustrating, but when I was little we lived in a town where you could see a lot of stars. My family and I would sit out in lawn chairs on our driveway and watch them. When we left California for a suburban town in Indiana where it was too cold for driveway sitting most of the year, my mom would walk my little brother and I over to the local high school to attend planetarium shows. The room would dim and the stars would move in front of us as we learned about constellations and deepspace voyagers. All of this is to say that when I think about being a child, I think about the world feeling so large and limitless. And as we age, I think our world starts to feel so small. Our adult human problems swell and fill up our sense of expansiveness. In a place like New York City, it can seem like a difficult task to return to that unknowable vastness, but I feel it when I lay out on my roof and stare at the moon, or the naughty feeling of standing in the center of the street at 4 am before everyone wakes up. I feel it when I’m able to go to a synagogue or cathedral in the middle of the day just the sit (The Museum on Eldridge Street is a personal favorite), and I feel it when I listen to this music that reminds me so much of being 10 years old watching a planetarium show. All it requires to remember we are all children is taking space to look up and out, at a glittering opaqueness eons older than all of us.
