The Work

My work is abstract, minimal, and defies standard expectations of presentation and access.  I am interested in common materials: gouache, graphite, tape, various paperboards, and cardboard. A type of "provisionalism".  My work possesses qualities of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Not being any one of those disciplines is my way of reaching an abstract visual language that responds to this time. The viewer can feel suspended between genres. The work is filled with formal concerns; at the same time, abstraction is not about nothing.  

Sue Sommers says about my work in her 2018 essay Art strata: deposition and erosion as process and message   

Postmodernism enriches the artist’s toolkit, but in its pure form, can return the artist to a position of servitude to society ....

Kiessling’s dual approach drives her to make beautiful abstract drawings that nevertheless hew closely to the current credo that the artist is an observer of the world and cannot help but communicate her environment.

The structure of my work references the visual plane of a prayer book dedicated to orphans, c.1930, hand-made by my grandfather. The work is intentionally intimate, frameless, floating, and transient. Language, word play, and the responsibility to choose one's words carefully are found in the titles expressed in Italian, Latin, and English. The translation of the prayer book revealed ephemera c. 1948, from the Franciscan publication, Crusader's Almanac.  The Almanac contained the Vatican's request for prayers for orphans and refugees of the Nakba at the then newly established Pontifical Mission in Beirut.  I recognized this translation after I had been making work since October 2023, which was a response to the Palestinian genocide

Abstraction is a time portal.  It is not linear, it is spiral. It intersects, weaves, and communicates through lineages. My work now responds to a genocide. My grandfather's prayerbook held documentation of the earlier history of that genocide.  He and I are speaking through time.  Our realities are fused, adding our voices to a history of many who recognize the necessity for individual liberation and peace. 

 Daily posts of work from the studio can be seen on Instagram @newpractice