Artist and musician Gina Phillips grew up in Madison County, Kentucky, in a household that felt as if it belonged to another century. Raised by a young single mother and grandparents, Phillips spent her youth in a small, insular home warmed by a coal-burning stove. With no hot water and a family full of artists, mechanics and musicians, Phillips’ first creative training happened not in a studio, but in the backyard. Phillips and her cousins spent summers creating clubhouses out of the raw material of her grandfather’s junkyard.
“That was really my first training as an artist, was building my own environments out of junk,” says Phillips.
After earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at the University of Kentucky, Phillips moved to New Orleans in 1995 for graduate school at Tulane. The city felt strangely familiar — a place of storytellers where chickens roamed the streets and architecture was as weathered as it was beautiful. Phillips never left, eventually establishing herself as a mixed-media artist known for her distinct use of fabric as a palette.
Hurricane Katrina proved to be a defining, if brutal, chapter. After her home in the Lower Ninth Ward flooded, Phillips found herself in a FEMA trailer for two years, working through the trauma of loss. Yet, she remained steadfast in her commitment to the neighborhood.
“Now I can’t imagine life without that being part of it,” says Phillips. “It’s just part of my story.”
Today, Phillips creates expansive works that serve as self-portraits, merging the hills of Kentucky with the levees of Louisiana. She approaches each piece with a painter’s eye, using fabric, thread and underpainting to tell epic, often humorous, narratives. Whether she is depicting historical figures like Jelly Roll Morton or mining her own childhood memories of digging holes and “caves” dubbed “Fort Dirt Hole,” with her cousins, Phillips fills in the blanks of history with sensitivity and imagination.
While she maintains a part-time teaching job to balance the volatility of the art world, her studio remains a place where the music is always playing and the story is never truly finished, while the South serves as an endless wellspring of inspiration.
“You have to laugh to keep from crying,” says Phillips. “That part of southern identity — finding the humor in adversity and challenging situations, and then it becomes this story. An epic story.”
Gina Phillips, ginaphillips.org
