Around the Kitchen Table

Often the most valuable things in life go overlooked. Sometimes these are everyday objects. Sometimes it is other people. Sometimes it’s fleeting moments of emotional wholeness which we then unconsciously spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to.

In 1990, American contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems, created an entire world with a modest set up. A series where she staged and photographed a fictional drama in which she plays the lead, accompanied by other cast members who play friends, lovers and daughters while gathering around the static setting; a simple kitchen table and an overhead light.

Kitchen Table Series became Ms Weems defining work, and over the decades that followed, led her to receive a 2013 MacArthur Genius Grant, amongst many other accolades. Her artwork takes aim at racism, sexism, politics and personal identity. This series compellingly examines women’s lives. In particular, it boldly asserts, Black womanhood’s complexity, strength and beauty.

Through her lens, she is suggesting that the familiar, unremarkable everyday kitchen table is actually an integral epicenter of family life and human drama.

It is where we greet lovers hello and goodbye as we waltz to and from the home.

It is where we exchange looks worth more than a thousand words.

It is where we gather to entertain and to gossip and to exchange deep belly laughs.

It’s where our parents painfully made us do homework and deep revision.

Vividly in black and white, Kitchen Table Series is showing us that the ordinary is where we get to spill over our hearts emotions. That the mundane is what holds the key to our exaltation, and joy is to be uncovered in the small things that we usually overlook.

The uncomplicated nature of the setting allows opportunity for the complexity of human emotions to be captured in earnest – mimicking the drama of our life – reminding me aptly of the old yogi sayings that life is not complicated at all, only we humans make it so.

And that too is okay.

To be complex. To be extraordinary. To be boring. To be full. To be empty. To completely spill over.

Because it’s interesting, and it makes art like this.

The drama of your life, is a kitchen table art series like this.

The invitation this week is to not just look, but to see, the drama of your life unfolding.

I am curious if you can see yourself at the epicenter of your play? And how do the other characters interact with you? Is it a comedic tragedy, or a heroine’s journey? Do you have a kitchen table equivalent where you can gather and allow your heart’s emotions to spill over?

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‘til next Sunday!
Z.