Keith E Kesler 2025

Abstract

Olly Olly Oxen Free is a multidisciplinary MFA thesis that explores the role of the artist as a “wounded healer,” interweaving personal history, psychoanalytic insight, and creative practice. Bridging my careers as both a visual artist and physician-psychoanalyst, the work investigates how emotional wounds—personal, cultural, and collective—can become sites of transformation and resistance through art. Inspired by Carl Jung’s notion of the shadow and the archetype of Chiron, this thesis frames creative practice as a form of psychological integration. Drawing upon myth, memory, and contemporary visual culture, the exhibition and writing trace a path of healing that emerges not from resolution, but from inhabiting the uncertainty and pain of lived experience. Through sculpture, photography, and narrative, the project reflects on dualities such as visibility/invisibility, control/autonomy, and trauma/resilience. Emerging from the pandemic and a climate of escalating cultural marginalization, works such as Olly Olly Oxen Free, It’s a Texas Thing, and Jazz Hands explore themes of exclusion and belonging in a Texas landscape shaped by regressive policy. Community collaborations, including Photography projects with OUT YOUTH in Austin, TX, centered on affirming the presence and identity of LGBTQ+ teens, exemplify the healing potential of portraiture and visibility. The experience of my trans granddaughter’s forced departure from university, underscore the real-life impact of political hostility and the need for compassionate presence. This work is not only autobiographical but operates as a cultural mirror, using materials like steel, plaster, and reclaimed objects to forge ritualistic totems of grief and resistance. In reclaiming artistic identity within the frame of therapeutic practice, the thesis asserts that creativity and vulnerability are tools for both personal metamorphosis and social critique. Ultimately, Olly Olly Oxen Free is a call to step out of hiding, into the light—an invitation for artist and viewer alike to witness, to feel, and to heal.