"Full Communion" is a series of drawings ranging from 18" x 24" to 6.5' x 6' that explore the wrestling interaction of human relationship, specifically through the lens of the artist becoming a mother. Through tightly rendered figures, each drawing conceptually exposes our tendencies to mask our humanity behind the neatly tied, well-packaged, perfectly presented "self". While exploring the nature of becoming a mother, with the reality that one emotion commonly sits openly, vulnerably and directly next to its opposite, abstracted form and deconstructed line become a predominate element within each drawing. This abstraction of form (new to Nowell-Wilson's work), acts as a developing library of vocabulary, a means of recording layered and complicated emotion that are often times inexplicable.
This series was created between March 2017 - March 2018, culminating in a solo show titled "Full Communion" at Project 1628 in Bolton Hill, Baltimore. Interviewed by Katherine Tzu-Ian Mann and published online on Bmore Art, Nowell-Wilson divuldges the conceptual formation of Full Communion in an article titled "Art, Motherhood, and Full Communion".
With this series, the final goal was to present a new body of work that acted as a processing tool for Nowell-Wilson, but also openly divuldged topics often un-discusses in the art world: relationship, growing pains, weight and movement within the realms of motherhood. Often the "roles" of Artist and Mother are viewed as seperate and combative, and art refrencing motherhood is seen as "mommy art" and hobby oriented. Lee Nowell-Wilson's work is an intentional opposition to that idea, and an exposure of the fact that motherhood does not compromise the quality of an artist's work.

(N)ONE is a continuation of the Full Communion series created by Lee Nowell-Wilson during her first year of motherhood. As with Full Communion, this project is an investigation of weight, the maternal, movement and human relatioship. Through continued use of charcoal and graphite to portray highly realistic and technical renderings of form and strucutre, Nowell-Wilson conceptually invetigates aspects of humanity masked behind the neatly tied, well packaged and "perfect self". Abstracting and deconstructing parts of each piece's structure becomes and effort to grapple with the formless, occasionally incoherent navigation of daily life; to reveal the unseen weight of motherhood, or the incalculable rhythm of marriage through layers of both defined representation and indistnct mark making.

Exploring Maternal Ambivalence Through Collaboration was a remote, collaborative project between myself and visual artist, Kaylan Buteyn. Although the ideas for the project were sown in 2019, the bulk of the project was executed this past Summer 2021. The project was originally planned for an in-person residency, however in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we shifted the project into being a remote collaboration.

For the execution, Kaylan traveled to Elsewhere Studios Residency in Colorado for a week and I stayed local to my home-studio with my 2 week old baby. However, the project filled a much larger umbrella in the end. The collaborative efforts of our work ignited a conversation that contrasted the "in-home" vs. "out-of-home" creative experience, exposing the realities of mothering and creating art simultaneously. Our daily-kept journals, sometimes written pensively at the day's end and other times jotted on scaps of paper in one-word-forms of expression, built a catalogue of the daily acts of mothering and created a library of mothering-artistry dialogue.

In the end, the project presented the tension, pulling and paradox felt within a mother's mind while reflecting on the equivocal journey of the maternal body itself. We play with elements of abstraction and components of realism in order to explore layers of complex human emotions -- ones that involve both pandemic and non-pandemic related ramifications. Kaylan's paintings are vibrantly layered with pressure, joy, weight and the idea of break boundaries. My drawings utilize classic household toys and festive objects seeped in familial memory to ride the line of comfort vs. strain. I also wanted to explore how activating the space between marks could metaphorically represent the lack of space between mother and child.

The full project included 3 large scale drawings created by me, 3 large scale paintings created by Kaylan, a recorded podcast episode (recorded by Kaylan) and a digital magazine (curated by me and designed by Darin Gilliam). Here on my profile, I have included only my drawings and the cover image of the magazine -- but Kaylan's paintings can be seen at https://www.milkedmagazine.com/pint-special-edition.