Kathleen Robbins

Into the Flatland

March 11 - May 1, 2014

In the fall of 2001, I relocated from New Mexico to the Mississippi Delta to live on my family’s farm, Belle Chase. I ate from my great-grandmother’s china, drank form her crystal and slept in her bed. At dusk I rocked on the porch and watched the blackbirds descend on the canebrake planted by my great-grandfather. Living on the farm I existed in a strange continuum. My family’s history and their connection to this place were markedly present in my everyday experience.

I left the family farm in 2003 to take a teaching position at the University of South Carolina. Into the Flatland explores familial obligation and our conflicted relationship with “home.” The photographs in this series were made during regular trips home to visit family over a period of several years. I chose to leave the Mississippi Delta for many of the same reasons anyone ever chooses to leave a rural area. This is land that my family has inhabited for generations, and I am pulled to this place in a way that I am not able to fully articulate. It is not my nostalgia alone that creates this longing; it is that of my mother and my mother’s mother.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Kathleen Robbins is an associate professor of art, coordinator of the photography program and affiliate faculty of southern studies at the University of South Carolina. Born in Washington DC and raised in the Mississippi Delta, Robbins received her MFA from the University of New Mexico in 2001. Her photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums including The New Orleans Photo Alliance, The Light Factory Museum of Contemporary Photography & Film, The Weatherspoon Museum, John Michael Kohler Art Center, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Addison Gallery of American Art, The Southeast Museum of Photography, the Society for Contemporary Photography, and the Mississippi Museum of Art. Robbins' work has also been featured by CNN Photo Blog, Flak Photo, Fraction Magazine, Conscientious, Humble Arts New York, NPR’s Picture Show, PDN’s Photo of the Day, Oxford American, and Garden and Gun. She is represented by the Rebekah Jacob Gallery in Charleston. In 2012, she was part of the Critical Mass top 50 and she was the recipient of the 2011 PhotoNOLA Review Prize. A new limited edition book of Into the Flatland was published by the New Orleans Photo Alliance in 2012. https://www.kathleenrobbins.studio/