Kennedi Carter’s Domestic Bliss in an Observable Universe

I had the opportunity to travel with Kennedi last year and learned that she is one of the funniest people I have ever met. She is quick, observant, and witty in a way that leaves your stomach and cheeks hurting from laughing so hard. What struck me though is her devotion to the craft of making pictures. She holds an incredible depth when it comes to the image making process in the way that feels ancestral, decolonial, intentional, soulful, community oriented, and precise.

In her body of work Domestic Bliss in an Observable Universe (2022 - present), Kennedi turns her lens toward Black matrescence, lineage, and the lore passed down through generations of women and caregivers. She says in her artist statement for the work - “In the weeks leading up to my son’s birth, I chose to keep my pregnancy private, shielding my journey into motherhood from even those closest to me. Instead, I turned to my family and community with questions—asking about their childhoods, their lovers, and the children they brought into the world. From these conversations, I was left wondering: How does intergenerational lore shape our entry into parenthood? How do family dynamics influence our understanding of mothering?”

After an emergency c-section, her son spent 82 days in the NICU. In the spaces between hospital visits, photography became a site of both processing and witnessing - A place to process birth trauma and a way to witness her own healing.

This incredibly moving body of work asks us to consider how we inherit, embody, and redefine mothering across generations. It expands our ideas of what counts as care, honors the quiet and often unseen labor of healing, and insists that domestic space can be an expansive and cosmic journey.

Kennedi’s work reminds me that the personal archive is political and holds the dialectic that lineage can be both burden and gift. To photograph one’s own body in recovery is an act of resistance and reclamation. Perhaps most powerfully that Black motherhood in all of its forms can be a radical site of world building.

You can explore more of Kennedi’s work here.