Strand, the Story of an Artist

Kevin Kirkwood sits down with photographer Linda Foard Roberts for a conversation about memory, family, loss, and the experiences that shape the way we see the world.

Working with 8x10 and 5x7 cameras, Linda creates deeply personal photographs rooted in family, nature, memory, and local histories. She favors old lenses; drawn to their imperfections and the unknown histories they carry. Her images are quiet, metaphorical, and layere...

Kevin Kirkwood sits down with Sybil Wornall, owner of Shain Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina, for a conversation about art, collecting, and the relationships that shape a gallery.

Born and raised in Charlotte, Sybil has spent nearly twenty years working in the art world. After graduating from North Carolina State University, she moved to Atlanta, where she spent close to a decad...

Kevin Kirkwood sits down with Charlotte-based painter Kate Schultz for a conversation about color, shape, nature, and the experiences that continue to influence her work.

Working in acrylic and mixed media, Kate creates paintings inspired by the quiet beauty of the natural world. In this episode, she discusses her current exploration of color relationships, her interest in moving aw...

Kevin Kirkwood recorded this episode a few weeks ago inside the studio of ceramicist, Lilith Rockett. 

Lilith is a Portland-based ceramicist who has spent 23 years working primarily in porcelain, creating tableware, teaware, and larger vessels. She spent 15 years collaborating with acclaimed chefs and restaurants. Her work has shown in national juried exhibitions, including the Smithsonian and the Craft Council. She has receiv...

Kevin Kirkwood joined Portland, Oregon-based sculptor and multidisciplinary artist Malia Jensen during his recent recording trip through the Pacific Northwest.

Malia’s work is focused primarily in sculpture and video. Her materially driven practice combines the tactile assertions of the hand-made with complex psychological narratives, physical comedy and a quest for beauty and understanding. Her work is held in many public an...

Kevin Kirkwood recorded this episode inside the Portland studio of Kari Merkl to talk about craft, materiality, and building a studio around collaborative problem-solving.

Kari has been designing and creating objects of function for over 25 years. She started in the study of architecture, which eventually led her to industrial design. That path shaped her hands on approach to fabrication. She founded Merkled Studio in 2009, a Portl...

Kevin Kirkwood recorded this episode in Portland, Oregon. This conversation covers fifty years of curating, a lifelong photographic documentation of a city, and what it means to grow up inside a family of working artists.

Christopher Rauschenberg is a Portland-based photographer and curator. He is a founding member of Blue Sky Gallery, where he has co-curated and co-produced over a thousand exhibitions since 1975. He a...

Kevin Kirkwood recorded this episode in Portland, Oregon, in a conversation covering craft, self-taught mastery, and the survival of a nearly lost trade.

Bryan Yonki is a Chilean sign painter, educator, and author based in Portland, Oregon. Inspired by the hand-painted signs he grew up seeing in Santiago, he moved to Los Angeles in 2014, taught himself the craft, and founded...

Kevin Kirkwood recorded this episode in Portland, Oregon during a weeklong trip through the Pacific Northwest, opening a new series of conversations with six regional artists and beginning with sculptor Ivan McLean.

Ivan took an unconventional road into art, from studying farm management at Cal Poly to the Peace Corps, a sheep station in Australia, and a furniture business r...

Kevin Kirkwood recently sat down with Savannah-based artist and designer Nikole Nelson.

Nikole Nelson is the founder of BLKCORAL, an interdisciplinary studio renowned for crafting immersive, thought-provoking environments that bridge fine art, interior architecture, and set design. A SCAD graduate, s...

Kevin Kirkwood recently visited Basil's studio to discuss his journey from Jamaica to the international stage, the development of his artistic voice, and the responsibility of creating public monuments that preserve collective memory.

Over the course of his career, Basil Watson has created public sculptures that explore history, identity, culture, and the human experience. H...

Kevin Kirkwood recently visited Navin's studio to talk about the objects, places, and histories that have shaped his art and practice.

Norling's work spans painting, assemblage, reclaimed windows, salvaged signage, and found objects: materials pulled from the edges of American life and reassembled into layered visual narratives. His practice draws on family history, folk tra...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Jeffry Loy, an Atlanta-based sculptor, public artist, and metalworker whose work explores the intersection of nature, fire, steel, and public space. Active in the Atlanta art scene for more than 30 years, Loy is known for creating hand-forged botanical sculptures, immersive installations, and large-scale public artworks that blend traditional blacksmithing with modern technology.

A graduate of the Atlant...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Yu-Kai Lin, founder and director of Kai Lin Art, a gallery that has played a major role in shaping Atlanta’s contemporary art scene for nearly two decades.

Over the years, Lin has worked with curators, developers, architects, and designers to build collections and curate exhibitions for organizations including High Museum of Art, Coca-Cola, ...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined with Esteban Patino, an Atlanta-based artist whose work explores language, symbolism, and the construction of meaning through painting, sculpture, and collage. Born in Medellín, Colombia, Patino builds visual systems that resemble language while resisting direct translation, moving between abstraction and representation.

His current solo exhibition,&...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Josh Aronson, a Miami-based artist and photographer whose work explores masculinity, vulnerability, and the shifting landscape of the American South. Born in Toronto and raised in Florida, Aronson’s perspective is shaped by a deep familiarity with the region’s contradictions, something that becomes a central thread throughout the conversation.

His photographs, which often blur the line betwee...

Kevin Kirkwood sits down with Savannah-based artist Rick Petrea, whose work spans painting, sculpture, ceramics, and collage. For over 30 years, Rick has explored figurative, expressionistic art, occasionally venturing into abstraction. His influences range from Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, and the CoBrA Group to comic books and outsider art, particularly by artists with schizophrenia.

In this episode, Kevin and Rick trace a l...

Kevin Kirkwood is joined by Jason Hoelscher, a painter, writer, and professor whose work explores the dynamics of attention, perception, and visual information.

Hoelscher’s practice sits at the intersection of art, philosophy, and information. His book Art as Information Ecology (Duke University Press, 2021) draws on aesthetic philosophy and information theory to reframe art as a living, complex system rather than a fixed obj...

Kevin Kirkwood visits the Savannah, Georgia studio of painter Christopher Moss, a space Christopher built by hand alongside his father, and the setting for an afternoon conversation about memory, place, and the quiet work of building a creative life.

Together, they trace his path from a childhood in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, through earning his MFA at CUNY Brooklyn College, to the practice he has cultivated in Savannah. Along the...