Lydia Kern '15 has always been a gatherer. As a child, she collected objects and found materials, not to house but to transform.

When she arrived at UVM, she was intent on social work. The joy of gathering resources and relationships into strong community felt natural.

The semester before graduation, she experienced a profound loss. It redirected her path and reoriented her life towards art, a passion she had by then developed for years.

Kern felt so held by her Burlington community as she navigated grief and artmaking that she stayed for a decade after graduation.

Now she is a full-time artist with a freshly unfurling life in NYC and a studio in Queens.  

The UVM Years

One of five kids, Kern spent her childhood in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

Kern felt drawn to UVM, for its "accessible local arts and music scene" and "proximity to a large body of water and access to nature."

Once here, the social work program made an impact on Kern’s path – notably its powerful combination of social work theory in the classroom and field work in the community.

Professor Celia Cuddy G'98 was especially influential in how Kern blossomed in the program, one which Kern describes as “a true and generative learning community.”

“Dialogue-based classes with my cohort still really shape how I think about connection and resources within communities,” she reflects, “which is a helpful lens to have in the world whether you are formally practicing social work or not.”

Though Kern now exclusively pursues artmaking, she finds it overlaps meaningfully with her background and training in social work.

“Social work and artmaking utilize similar skill sets -- creative problem solving, meaning-making, acquiring material resources to meet specific needs, supporting processes of transformation, and navigating the unknown," she reflects.

Whether supporting adults with disabilities through the nonprofit Home Base, Inc. or collaborating on various community art projects, she finds these intertwine with "similar root causes" of her art practice.

Alongside her social work curriculum and community, Kern felt invigorated by Professor Nancy Dwyer’s sculpture class.

She describes it as the first place she “more fully understood the potential of found objects in forming a language of material poetics.”

In the art and social work departments, some of Kern’s deepest classroom learning happened “in discussion circles,” with “both disciplines addressing themes of transformation, meaning-making, and our ability to be active change agents – both in the world and with materials.”

Those years on campus also brought Kern the opportunity to participate in her first direct-action protest, by way of a die-in led by a student climate activist group.

She and the rest of the group laid down on the floor of the Waterman building as a way of protesting UVM's investment in companies that don't align with its stated Common Ground Values -- specifically, those related to respect for all life.

"It's really cool to see that years later, in 2020, the University did in fact divest, listening to the voices of students and faculty," she reflects.

Kern adds, "I hope the University follows suit in our current moment..."

Beyond the classroom, Kern describes living in Slade Hall, then UVM's environmental co-op housing, as "one of the most foundational experiences" of her young adult life. Residents at the time were able to waive a traditional meal plan, instead building nightly potluck dinners around produce purchased at local farms.

"Slade was another place where I learned while sitting in a circle — we had weekly house meetings, where we practiced consensus-based decision-making, covering topics from how many pounds of carrots to order, to checking in on how everyone was doing, to how our weekly open mic nights were running," she tells us.

"It provided a format to experiment putting our values to action, being accountable to a group, and making space for the arts in daily life."

Though this iteration of Slade no longer exists, "its influence resounds throughout the wider Burlington community."

Transformation

One semester before her graduation, Kern tragically lost her sister.

The intense experience – both the loss and the “deep support” she received in Burlington -- “really clarified what was important to me."

This put things in focus for Kern. Instead of pursuing social work – her undergraduate concentration – she threw herself into artmaking.

She found art could not only bring people together, but also gave her the ability to connect with others and process those "aspects of the human experience we all share yet are difficult to express in words alone."

Love, grief, joy, and transformation – Kern’s work bypasses the restraints of language as a path to deeper meaning.

“The poetics of visual art became a space to honor the psychological, emotional, and spiritual aspects of life and memory.”

“My work,” she says, “often exists as additive assemblages, both in concept and material, for ineffable experiences in life...” 

It “recalls quilts, stained-glass windows, x-rayed bodies, and cosmological charts – structures where emotion, symbology, mysticism, tragedy, transcendence, and trauma research can be held together.”

Of late, she has been using a lot of "resin, found objects, and printed images on transparencies,” always in search of materials that catch her eye, "or hold some sort of metaphorical meaning.”

This approach has led Kern to gather materials in a bevy of places, including “thrift stores, compost piles, free bins, florist shops and dumpsters -- nothing is off limits.”

"I approach my life and work as one ongoing experiment," Kern tells us, "like an additive poem or a quilt -- accumulating materials and experiences along the way – a mash up of unfolding meaning and aesthetic."

Therein lies her advice to fellow Catamounts finding their way into and through their career in the arts: "Find the artists or other people in your profession with whom you give and receive support. The relational web you build around your practice is just as important as the work itself, especially when art is more of an open field than a clear sequential path. Celebrating the successes and weathering the rejections is much richer together."

Anthology and Beyond

Kern found a way to transform grief into beauty, loss into connection, and refuse into art.

It is befitting that the last piece before her departure from the city that showed her such tenderness during an impossible time should be her largest to date, Anthology. It embodies "what is fleeting yet enduring -- the persistence of beauty and the certainty of change."

Anthology, translating into ‘collection of flowers’ from the Greek anthologia, is aptly titled -- "composed of hundreds of preserved flowers gathered by neighbors across Burlington."

Kern suspended each flower in mid-bloom, capturing it at the peak of its beauty and rendering it timeless. It forces us to coexist with the inevitability of loss as well as beauty. The flowers are cast into "sunset-colored shadows," which change throughout the day with the movement of the sun. They are held alongside other found materials, such as snake skin, a paper wasp nest, three bells, an x-ray of a bleeding heart, and a daffodil from a May Day protest.

The sculpture forms a passable archway at the edge of City Hall Park and was commissioned by Burlington City Arts.

"I'm inspired," she says, "by the poetic meaning flowers often hold for us -- used to celebrate joy and commemorate loss. This feels appropriate for its proximity to City Hall, a space where so many 'threshold' life moments occur -- birth and death certificates, marriages, gender-affirming name changes, and protests. These moments (personally, or as a species) are not meant to be passed through alone; they require collective participation and support."

All of the resin 'stones' were made to support and hold one another in place. The work itself was "possible by a web of Vermont fabricators" as well as the community members who gathered the flowers used in the piece.

In this way, Kern notes, Anthology "echoes collectivity, both in structure and in the creation process" and "belongs to everyone."

Read more about Alumni lives

UVM Alumni are living rich lives, doing astounding and impactful work in many fields, in communities around Vermont, across the US, and around the world. Here are just a few of the stories we've gotten to share recently:

• Alumni Spotlight: Michele Steckler '84

• Alumni Spotlight: Muriel Stockdale '79

• Alumni Spotlight: Sara Kinnamon Fritsch '00

• "It Feels Like Coming Home": Cathy Irish Tremblay ’85 on the Power of Staying Connected to UVM

• Breaking Barriers and Giving Back: Dr. Mona Trempe’s Enduring Impact on Women in Science

  
  

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• Lydia Kern

Editor's AI Disclosure Note

Generative AI was not used at any phase of the creation of this piece, including during the interview, drafting, or editing of this article, its outline, images, captions, or summary.

Photo Captions:

1.        Lydia Kern in downtown Burlington with Anthology. | Photo: Daniel J. Cardon

2.        Lydia Kern at work | Photo by Macaulay Lerman

3.        Art by Lydia Kern | Photo by Daniel J. Cardon

4.        Kern's Anthology, at City Hall Park in downtown Burlington. | Photo by Matthew Binginot