Thinking Like a Flower
Jennifer Lee Sullivan
If you meet a person who identifies herself as an artist, you might research her work, and connect her with it. From then on, you’ll see the art when you see the person, like an alter ego.
But if you have a friend who keeps her artistry under wraps, you won’t make this association yet. You’ll develop a sense of her that’s independent from her artistic expression, like getting familiar with the individual colors of a palette before realizing them capable of combination.
I first came to know Kelly Duffield in the law firm where we were new associates. Even with a considerable billable hour requirement, Kelly had an air of calm. At the time, I took this as a sign of a deep tranquility; now I think she just handles stress by seeking the center of the storm. As we moved into motherhood together, I marveled at Kelly’s ability to maintain a law practice while tending to babies, and keeping a beautiful house. She’d host dinners and I’d contemplate her uncluttered floors, the carefully-chosen furniture that seemed designed for each room. With so many kids and responsibilities, there had to be chaos, but it didn’t show. When she moved away for her husband Erik’s work, I’d gape at the pictures of the Indiana farmhouse she was renovating. Even the chicken coop looked tidy.
The Duffields returned to Boulder, along with the chickens. Over coffee one day Kelly mentioned she’d also returned to her original passion: art. I felt like a priest in a confessional, if confessionals were for happy secrets. I knew she’d majored in art history, but had no idea that Kelly was herself an artist. She offered her phone, displaying pictures of the work she’d done since her return.
Words can’t describe the experience of seeing Kelly’s art nearly as well as the art itself: I felt like a person wearing a business suit, whose head had been replaced with a flower. I was the astonished, faceless soul in Untitled IV, 2019 (cat. 9). Kelly’s work requires a different mode of thought to assimilate, a wilder, more open, less logical framework than the standard lawyer deploys in the day-to-day.
In engaging with Kelly’s art, I’ve found the flower-head an apt metaphor for the best way to access it. When I come to her work in the midst – I’ve stopped by her house to pick something up, but have to get back to the office – I can’t assess the latest piece with the same purposeful, focused thinking applied to legal issues. Instead, I have to let my mind relax, allowing it to interact with the images in the wondrous spirit that Kelly’s work inspires.
The benefit of learning about Kelly’s artwork long after establishing our friendship is that I’ve never synonymized her with her art. Instead, my sense of her as a full-fledged person allows me to see aspects of the person in Kelly’s pieces. Art is often a sort of dialogue between the creator and the audience, but my familiarity with Kelly deepens this conversation.
And yet Kelly’s art asks me to make my own sense of it. Before having a serious artist-friend, I imagined that being close with an artist would provide a key to unlock the mystery of that person’s work. Lacking any training in art and art consumption, I’ve always assumed the connoisseurs have the code that reveals what an artist truly meant. Now I know this isn’t the case, at least not for everyone. Kelly doesn’t want to give her audience a code, she wants them to experience her work in their own way. She abandoned the practice of naming her pieces early on; she didn’t want to tell people what to think by assigning titles. This decision grants me freedom as a viewer, able to self-interpret pieces without the uneasy suspicion that I’m missing something others grasp.
Many of Kelly’s pieces suggest both industry and artistry, evoking Kelly at the start of this century: a by-day lawyer with a mind eager to break free of law’s strictures to create works of imagination, unfettered by corporate confines. Untitled III, 2019 and Untitled IV, 2019, both show suited figures with alternative heads, a flower and a butterfly, above whom modern office-type furniture levitates. The composition imparts a sense that rules have been suspended, for some benevolent reason.
Whereas surrealism can seem bleak – think of Dali’s melting clocks, Picasso’s distorted faces – what upends the order in Kelly’s pieces are playful elements. The suspended chairs mingle with flowers on kitchen string; there’s a lama on a leash; the butterfly-headed business person faces off with a peacock. According to conventional wisdom, for Type-A lawyers disorder is a menace. But in Kelly’s work, chaos is as elevated as the floating Wegner elbow chair in Untitled VI, 2018.
I see transitions in Kelly’s work. Untitled III, 2017 (cat. 10) features a child walking along a conference table, carrying a figure that might be an adult woman. To me, this piece is symbolic of Kelly’s own departure from the business world, leaving behind law in favor of caring for her five children and reconnecting with her passion for art. I see the way that professional women are often swept along a path by family, the way our children carry us in a direction that’s not always of our choosing.
And it’s Kelly’s invocation of motherhood that stirs in me the deepest response. Many works display a domestic sense of purpose, and hint at the kind of loose hold one has to accept in a house full of children. In Untitled XIII, 2018 (fig. e) a woman hangs suspended above a kitchen island, behind which is grouped a tower of giraffes. They look hungry, dinner preparations are underway, and the swirl of household objects surrounding the woman suggests the madness of the family weeknight. In the floating woman’s giraffe mask I see the game face we put on to proceed with the nightly rituals despite the arguments, complaints, and ordinary emergencies every parent must endure.
The serenity that announces itself when you meet Kelly shows up in these pieces, too. The backdrops to her unusual combinations tend to be plain palettes in muted, calming tones. The soft pinks, grays, blues, and greens are soothing, and suggest the kind of order that Kelly always seems to maintain without effort. The compositions themselves, of course, are proof of the energy it takes to maintain this kempt appearance. There’s the suspended woman hovering above her brood of hungry giraffes (fig. e), and the person pushing a mower in Untitled IX, 2019 (fig. b) to remind us of the work that goes into running a household. There are overturned chairs and couches against otherwise-spotless backdrops to suggest the din of disorder that constantly undoes yesterday’s labors.
And finally, there are the children. The children in Kelly’s creations can’t be trusted quite yet. They get up to mischief. There’s a girl on a swing in the living room (fig. a), a green-booted, pants-less young gardener trampling the seedlings (fig. d), a child balanced on a precarious pile of tableware, cutlery, and furniture on the roof of a house (fig. c), for crying out loud. They’re floating away, they’re standing on the sofa, and in Untitled VII, 2018 (cat. 17), they’re not even human – they’re sea creatures swimming around home, one tangled in its own line. But these images have the curious and helpful effect of pointing out not only the inevitability of child-created chaos, but also the happiness of it, and its fleeting nature. In the trenches of parenthood, when the mower is broken and dinner isn’t ready and there’s a random knife on the floor where someone could damn well step on it, we need to don our flower-heads and appreciate the mess that’s swirling around us. Flowers wilt, children grow, and eventually we’ll be able to keep our houses in the order we strive for every day. Kelly’s work reminds us to revel in the unpredictability of modern-day parenthood. It’s a testament to the truth that a life in which everything stays in its rightful place might be very dull indeed.
ABOUT THE WRITER: Jennifer Lee Sullivan is a lawyer, mediator, and writer based in Boulder, Colorado. Her nonfiction has been published in SELF Magazine and she has won a residency at Hedgebrook. Her story “The Shine” won second place in the Lorian Hemingway short story competition. Jennifer grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, earned her B.A. from Case Western Reserve University, and earned her J.D. from Duke University School of Law. She is at work on her first book.