home / place

by Natalie Baxter

I created this collection of video portraits of women in eastern Kentucky nearly ten years ago while pursuing my Masters in Fine Art from the University of Kentucky. It’s both comforting and humbling to revisit past work, but I find this timing especially poignant. I moved from Kentucky to New York City shortly after completing this film. I now find myself confined to a small apartment with my husband and baby in the midst of a global pandemic, in a universal holding pattern of our usual lives, contemplating how we want to shape our future life and home with our daughter.

Creating home/place was an exploration of my maternal roots in eastern Kentucky - an interest in how place shapes one’s identity and how these feelings and definitions of home trickle through generations. The women, many of whom are my kin, touch on issues of education, employment, the environment, and regional stereotypes. They also share their loving but sometimes conflicting feelings of the place they all call home. Conjuring up nostalgia for a quieter, more resourceful way of life that many of us have been jolted into experiencing at this universal moment of pause and reflection.

Natalie Baxter (b. 1985, Kentucky) explores concepts of place-identity, nostalgic americana, and gender stereotypes. Baxter received an MFA from the University of Kentucky in 2012 and a BA in Fine Art from the University of the South in Sewanee, TN in 2007. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally with recent solo exhibitions at The Elijah Wheat Showroom (Brooklyn, NY), Next to Nothing Gallery (New York, NY), Cunsthaus (Tampa, FL), and Institute 193 (Lexington, KY). Press for Baxter’s work includes, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, and Bomb Magazine. She currently lives and works in New York, NY.
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