Archive Article: Andrea Keys O Connell Emerging Artist 2009 Andréa Keys

Appears in the November 2015 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

Andréa Keys

The sculptures that I make are driven by a desire to investigate how an individual’s personal history affects their identity, behaviors and actions. I am especially interested in inter-generational trauma and how a person’s past—particularly a past that has been interrupted by a traumatic event such as war—can influence patterned behaviors that are passed through the family. I focus on characters who take their cues from Western ideals of a collective identity. I am utilizing images, patterns and symbols found in specific notions of Western identity and Jungian psychology to create my characters, yet I am displaying them in environments that are unfamiliar. The element of fantasy that is thus created shows how the past and the present, dream and reality, conscious and unconscious, familiar and unfamiliar can exist together in an environment that is uncanny, similar to the way subconscious memories of a traumatic event can be very much alive in our conscious actions.