Brothers and Sisters, a collaboration between visual artist and bookmaker Kiowa Casey and multi-instrumentalist Alexander Morrison, is a rumination on connection, memory and place.

The two artists met online in 2007 and remained friends after bonding over their experience with fostering; Casey spent over a decade in foster care, while Morrison was raised alongside fostered children as a biological child of foster parents.

In 2022, they began a long-distance creative exchange, responding to each other’s works through the lens of their individual craft. The result is a series of psychological landscapes layered with material complexity and unruly design. A potent reflection of the world the duo inhabit.

“I was interested in the sound of home,” explains Casey, who is from the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales, when I ask her about the project’s genesis. “I was away studying in Bristol and missing home. Morrison would make recordings of birds on the river outside his home and then compose a piece of music. I’d make pictures in response. The relationship between sound, visuals and memory is so potent. It was an extraordinary moment underpinned by this shared experience.”

Drawing on personal experience is a throughline in Casey’s work, not just to metabolise significant life events but to nurture community through compassion. Her practice opens up a dialogue about loss, suicide and addiction, topics which remain culturally taboo despite their universality. In San Amado – currently on show at Bristol’s Serchia Gallery – Casey honours her relationship with her mother, who passed away in May 2023 following chronic struggles with alcoholism.

Set against the backdrop of the family home, the work encompasses a series of close-up intimate details of the artist’s siblings and extended family. Portraiture acts as a physical and metaphorical connective tissue, uniting the group. Together with hazy scenes of unruly fauna, quails and frogs’ legs, Casey posits a quiet rumination on love and acceptance.

“At first, it was all instinctive,” recalls Casey. “My mum quite unexpectedly passed away during one of her relapses, and in reaction, I felt drawn to exploring the duality of loving somebody through addiction. I very much needed to find forgiveness and acceptance of who she was as a human being outside of her role of being my mother. San Amado is about finding my way through those feelings of grief, discovering the strength of unwavering love and its ability to transcend new distances.”

Casey’s journey with photography has moved quickly. She picked up a camera for the first time just two months before deciding to enrol in her BA at the University of West England. While this may sound impulsive, her relationship with the medium, in particular the role of the family album, has been a constant throughout her life.

“I grew up in foster care,” Casey tells me. “I didn’t have everything I needed to know about my upbringing. I lost my dad when I was very young, so the family archive became a sacred place to get a sense of who he was and where I came from. I found a film camera at the family home during the first lockdown and never put it down.” Looking at Casey’s portfolio, her unwavering conviction and her embodied sensitivity as a storyteller, it’s hard to believe she only graduated this summer.

Casey’s photography is just one aspect of her storytelling. Early on, she prioritised learning the craft of making books by hand. Refining this skill is less about presentation – although it frames the personal nature of her work elegantly – instead, it becomes an iterative process that supports the development of a body of work, enabling her to find a rhythm through her pictures. Like a filmmaker piecing frames together, creating poetry out of a sequence of images is how Casey understands the work and most potently understands where one project ends and another begins.

Merging analogue techniques with a social purpose and a poetic sensibility, Casey has crafted a visual realm that operates between reality and dreams. While she is initially focused on establishing her place in a fine art context, her unique vision has the potential to cut through the commercial noise and connect with audiences in meaningful ways.

@kiowacasey