Artist Statement, 2026

Kerry Hugins is an Austin, Texas-based interdisciplinary artist working across installation, community-based practice, and ecological research, with a focus on plant-human relations, care structures, and collective experience. Her garden is not merely a source of inspiration—it is a living collaboration with the land, pollinators, and the rhythms of the natural world. Her art is grounded in flowers and patterns. In Anthropocene times, she uses flowers as a point of breathing, a moment of pause and reflection. 

She focuses on watercolor as an homage to the history of female knowledge and the tradition of botanical painters, a culture that uniquely bridged art, science, and environmental awareness. Kerry shares this generational knowledge with her daughter, continuing the historical practice of women passing wisdom through generations: maintaining gardens, seed libraries, and understanding crop rotation—sustaining local ecology essential for community survival. She uses plants as symbols of resilience or as markers of the destruction wrought by Anthropocene landscapes. 

Her early life, marked by frequent relocations, profoundly shaped her perception of life and grief. Constantly losing community and friends, she lived in South Africa, Mexico (twice), Germany, and Nepal, experiences that informed her multifaceted identity: belonging to many places and to nowhere at once. This experience cultivated a unique sense of home across geographies, emphasizing the interconnectedness we share on this planet while acknowledging profound grief—a path that ultimately led her to work as a death doula.

Kerry incorporates alchemy, magic, meditation, and esoteric knowledge into her practice as tools for self-discovery and co-creation with the viewer. She believes meditation transforms perception, guiding attention to both the visible and the unseen. She employs sacred geometry and repeating patterns as meditative devices, uses UV light to create liminal spaces, and cultivates her installations through meditation. Lucid dreaming is a method she uses to slow down, attune to the subtle sounds of small creatures, and deepen observation. Her work invites the viewer to take a fresh breath in the midst of daily chaos, offering moments of reflection, presence, and reconnection.