Kaitlin Roney is a visual artist, art activist, and art educator living in Rochester, NY.
“Tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” ~ Mary Oliver
Life Lines is a series of oil paintings, completed between 2024-2025, funded by a grant from Genesee Valley Council on the Arts. Each piece represents a line from a poem, written by Kaitlin Roney. Both the poem and paintings are based on Erikson’s phases of psychological development, from inception to death.
How do we measure a lifetime? At first, milestones. Is she crawling yet? Any disabilities? What’s her first word? One birthday, then another. Is she performing at the top of the class? What about extracurriculars? A new partner, then another. Is she working? How much money is she making? Possibly a wedding, then a house. Is she going to have a baby? What about future grandchildren? How easy is it to lose sight of the internal matters that truly matter; the ones that define a lifetime? Often, we are left spinning, with nowhere to focus amidst the chaos, until one day it quiets and we realize that we have put all the energy into building our own, beautiful cages.
She often comes to know her worth through external expectations and values. What about the breath in between the birthdays, graduations, disasters, check points and death? Is life not defined in the negative space? How we spend each day is in fact how we spend our lives. Eventually, conscious memories are molded and shaped into something new. Do we not experience everything three times; through anticipation, the moment, and the memory?
Life Lines was born from these questions and conversations. As a woman in my forties, I am aware that I may have as much life in front of me as I do in my past. According to Erik Erikson’s theory, I have recently transitioned from the Intimacy vs. Isolation phase to the Generativity vs. Stagnation phase of psychological development. Erik Erikson (15 June 1902 – 12 May 1994) was an American child psychoanalyst known for his theory on psychosocial development of human beings. He coined the phrase identity crisis. Was my need to write a poem, create a series of paintings about the meaning of life, and engage with those around me typical of the generativity phase? Possibly. Either way, I began talking to other women about how they defined a lifetime, researching the eight phases outlined in Erikson’s theory, and came up with this body of work.
Through a very personal lens, I have attempted to search for meaning in my work, and hope that it allows viewers to reflect, project or dream about the matters that actually matter in their fleeting lives.