About
Kerry
Hugins.
Austin-based interdisciplinary artist working across installation, community-based practice, and ecological research.
Biography
A practice shaped by place, memory, and care.
Born in 1981, Kerry Hugins was deeply influenced by an international upbringing. As the daughter of American diplomats, she spent her formative years overseas, where displacement and cross-cultural observation came to shape her interest in memory, environment, and collective experience.
Hugins has presented work in group exhibitions across the United States and completed residencies at Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, El Sur in Mexico City, and Ghost Ranch in Abiquiú, New Mexico. She earned her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and lives in Austin with her family.
She is a mother and death doula. These roles inform a long-term engagement with care, transition, and lived experience. Hugins is fluent in English and Spanish, with working knowledge of German.
Moving image
Studio / process
Artist statement / 2026
Flowers and patterns as a place to breathe.
Kerry Hugins works across installation, community-based practice, and ecological research, with a focus on plant-human relations, care structures, and collective experience. Her garden is not merely a source of inspiration: it is a living collaboration with the land, pollinators, and the rhythms of the natural world. Her art is grounded in flowers and patterns. In Anthropocene times, she uses flowers as a point of breathing, a moment of pause and reflection.
She focuses on watercolor as an homage to the history of female knowledge and the tradition of botanical painters, a culture that bridged art, science, and environmental awareness. Kerry shares this generational knowledge with her daughter, continuing historical practices of women passing wisdom through generations: maintaining gardens, seed libraries, and understanding crop rotation. Plants become symbols of resilience and markers of the destruction wrought by Anthropocene landscapes.
Her early life was marked by frequent relocations through South Africa, Mexico, Germany, and Nepal. Living between places cultivated a sense of home across geographies, while also acknowledging profound grief and eventually leading her to work as a death doula.
Hugins incorporates alchemy, magic, meditation, and esoteric knowledge as tools for self-discovery and co-creation with the viewer. Sacred geometry, repeating patterns, UV light, and lucid dreaming are meditative devices for attention to both the visible and the unseen. Her work invites a fresh breath in the midst of daily chaos: a moment for reflection, presence, and reconnection.