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Lydia Kern

@lydeia

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𝑼𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒍𝒆𝒅 (𝒂 𝒔𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒍𝒆𝒏𝒆𝒔𝒔), 2024, 15x4x41”, MRI’s of artist’s brain, plumbing fasteners, negative photos of roses printed on transparency, rose dust covered wooden ‘holders’, gel medium, resin, artist’s tape, amaranth aka ‘love lies bleeding’

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thank you @mallorycainbreiner for growing the amaranth and for the holding device thoughts, @ratbabyjones for the bag of rose petal powder that keeps on giving

@danieljcardon 📷💫🙏🏻 by @lydeia

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2 years ago

Compost Angel (guardian for an unwritten unknown future), 2025

piano parts, begonia leaf negatives, garden grid, addie’s compost photo on transparency, gardening twine, embalming thread, red string, streamer from annabeth’s dance party where I felt joy, resin

🦋🪽🪲 🔁 🪱 🦋
little persistent reckoner, crumbling/integrating the past, laid out in full transparency, resurrecting/holding itself up w the bones of the new song it’s singing. process based actions in the material present moment resulting in better future conditions. past present future meeting in it’s little body.

@gcdodds 📸 by @lydeia

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10 months ago

𝑳𝒐𝒏𝒈𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒎 𝑸𝒖𝒊𝒄𝒌 𝑭𝒊𝒙 , 2024, 23x4x19’, resin, MRIs of artist’s brain, negative images of roses printed on transparency, artist’s tape, rose dust covered wooden ‘holders’, gel medium

📷 @danieljcardon 🙏🏻

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👁️❣️🤲🏻📖!look out for your mind!📖🤲🏻❣️👁️ by @lydeia

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2 years ago

Reprise, Reprieve, 2026

34x7x1.5”, piano parts, resin, blue string, embalming thread, birthday candle, red string, houseplant clipping, images of swans at ridgewood reservoir on transparency

🙏📸 @ben.heyer taken in Ridgewood Reservoir by @lydeia

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15 hours ago

Recurring Swan Song (reprieve, reprise), 2026

24x20x1.5”, resin, piano parts, birthday candle, paper scraps, artist’s tape, image of an iron swan fence on catalpa ave, images of swans in ridgewood reservoir, images of artist’s body, blue string from andi

The swans at ridgewood reservoir in wintertime- moments of incisive beauty as strong power chords that can pull us through or accompany us during moments of great transition/loss—endings & beginnings. Loving specific things as mental/spiritual tools in this age of collapse, fragment, assemblage. *an affinity for life*

a natualist told me that the swans living in prospect park are named “Biggie and Colette”— I don’t know if anyone ever named the pair living at Ridgewood Reservoir.

Other images: the reservoir swans, iron swan fence on catalpa ave, excerpt from Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Dead Doe: I”

@ben.heyer 📸🙏 taken in Ridgewood Reservoir by @lydeia

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5 days ago

BEING ALIVE is open through October 24th by appointment:) thanks @_body_wash for bringing us all together 💞💞💞 by @lydeia

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16 days ago

“archive” of the day 🌞 by @lydeia

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2 months ago

SPECTRAL RESONANCE opens at @maidenlanegallery_kingston on Friday, April 10th, 5-8pm.

First 3 photos: Seed Saver, 2024 (see previous post for materials)
& Many Among Us, 2024, 25x4x21’, resin, digital negatives printed on transparency, ink, dyed ribbon, rose, red string

from the press release:
Featuring Robin Kang, Lydia Kern, and Sophia Sobers and curated by
Natale Adgnot, Spectral Resonance brings together sculpture, weaving, sound, and more to examine the vibrating thresholds where organic systems meet technological architecture. With ghostly remnants of man-made technologies from medical imaging to found hardware, these artists explore how the unseen intelligence of the natural world is recorded, translated, and rematerialized through human systems.
Throughout the gallery, sound-both literal and implied-serves as the primary connective tissue. @sobers__ @spiderwoman1s0s @natale_adgnot

April 10 - May 3, 2026
Opening reception: Friday, April 10, 5-8pm
Sound Bath April 12th 2pm
Artist talk May 3rd

📍9 Maiden Lane Gallery: 51 Maiden Ln, Kingston NY taken in Kingston, New York by @lydeia

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6 months ago

thanks @nuisancegallery @grahamokay for making “Carry the Day” happen 🌞

from pr: Nuisance is pleased to present Carry the Day, on view March 13 through April 2, 2026. Functioning as allegory, Carry the Day breaks time into iconographic moments and encounters, populating the matrix of daily experience with recurring forms, charged moments, and the supporting characters that create a quotidian experience. Featuring the talented and kind @scrappyeeeeee @bridget.quirk @itai.lavie @emilydrewu taken in New Brunswick, New Jersey by @lydeia

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6 months ago

exhibition text from Torch Songs by @mallorycainbreiner ❣️🌹 by @lydeia

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7 months ago

Rose Ladder, 2022/2025

roses, embalming thread

🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀

This piece holds a really potent place in my heart- thinking about Ocean Vuong’s 2014 essay published in the Rumpus titled “The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation”. He talks about intense personal loss and the way art can function as an emergency ladder/fire escape, connection & scaffolding amidst the languageless experiences in life. Heaven as connection, a ladder turned horizontal, a bridge between two people. Also love love William Blake’s painting titled “Jacob’s Ladder”.

1-3📸 @gcdodds
4-5 📸 @danieljcardon
🙏🙏 by @lydeia

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7 months ago

Torch Song (lifeline, timeline, lifetime)2025

roses, torched piano pinboard, ribbon, embalming thread, red string, bells,  rocks from lake champlain, resin, transparency negatives of roses 
We wrap wounds to heal, gifts to give, precious objects for safe keeping. Wrapped up when we are born & when we die—two ends of the circle coming together in the same act, the song on loop. 
A few years ago @pioneerworks , Cornell West interviewed Simon Critchley about his book “On Mysticism”. The book talks about felt experience, praxis, music, and elemental substances like fire and water—a wide philosophical stance rather than a purely religious one. I keep thinking about this part of the conversation:

SC: “What is it about music that is able to carry that, (that experience, a capillary that can move us, doing the work that religion has traditionally done)—that’s the mystery isn’t it?”

CW- “We don’t really know. That moment in Levi Strauss’s memoir, when he says ‘the supreme mystery of human knowledge is the invention of melody’.

I think Vico comes close in The New Science when he says ‘in fact that we begin with burial and we begin with the human response to the corpses of loved ones in which silence is more crucical than discourse and in which moans and groans are so visceral that they begin a process of noise and get transfigured into sound and then philosophy comes later.’

That’s still a mythic reading but its probably the closest we’re going to get and that’s 1725. How do we make what we do in philosophy musical? How do we make pedagogy musical? How do you do it musically, which is organic, which got the flow but is also mindful of what serious music is all about. What is schubert about? What is opus 131? What do you do with aretha franklin?”

This idea of the grieving cries (and silence) that come after losing the body of someone you love, or the cries of birth, being transfigured into sound— that this is the place music comes from— is beautiful to me. How much would change if ideology & power structures were more musical- if informed by, in light of and integrated with this core chord of visceral love—which is often illuminated by loss.

📸 @gcdodds 🙏 by @lydeia

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8 months ago