homewardbound: K Shanks

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 11, 6–9 PM
Exhibition Dates: October 11 – November 2, 2025

Special Performance with Ashley Allen: Saturday, October 11, 7 PM
The artist will inhabit and activate the space during monthly gallery hours.



Good Children Gallery is excited to present homewardbound by new gallery member K Shanks. Join us for the opening reception Saturday, October 11, from 6–9 PM. A special performance featuring friend and collaborator, Ashley Allen will take place at 7pm that evening. Additionally, the artist will inhabit and activate the space throughout the monthly gallery hours.

Visitors are also invited to participate in the work by contributing a word, phrase, or small object emblematic to them of their own relationship to home. They will have the opportunity to temporarily bind this into a communally built structure. After the run of the exhibition, participants may choose whether they would like to arrange a meeting for its return: a chance for reflection as well as a physical offering of gratitude from the artist for what they have shared.

“The disorientation of the sense of home, as the ‘out of place’ or ‘out of line’ effect of unsettling arrivals…this orientation might be described as the lived experience of facing at least two directions: toward a home that has been lost, and to a place that is not yet home.”
— Sara Ahmed
Queer Phenomenology

homewardbound searches for the places, people, and moments where we recognize home and how we tie ourselves to them. Shanks delves into the effects of environment and social structures on the ability to move freely and the impact that has on ones’ ability to feel at home in their own skin and the world at large. These inquiries consider many factors—how do we create a sense of safety and security for ourselves? How does this change with familiarity or encounters with the unknown? The answers manifest differently in how we construct our personal spaces, inwardly and outwardly, and who we invite within. When we move from the individual to the communal body, how do we support and protect one another? These works embrace the distinct vulnerability of the movement between places. They are wrapped up in that desire for growth which can motivate that change, the bonds we develop both with the landscapes and people who inhabit them with us, and the time and labor necessary to make home.

K Shanks (they/them, b. 1988) is a transdisciplinary visual artist working across the fields of sculpture, print, installation and performance, currently living and making in New Orleans, Louisiana, where they recently graduated with their MFA in Sculpture from Tulane.

Growing up in the high deserts of Southern California, they spent their formative years exploring and learning from the rich and varied landscapes and bustling urban centers of their home state. These experiences instilled a deep respect for the interdependent relationships between beings (human and beyond) and delicate natural systems, while kindling a distrust of the interruptive and often destructive structures imposed societally. This cultivated appreciation and suspicion are foundational to both their location based and embodiment work. Shanks utilizes weaving, stitching, quilting, and other labor-intensive fiber techniques as modalities to interrogate assumed frameworks, deconstruct binary thinking, and nurture new pliable relationships between their varied subject matter and content. Working from a queer ecological perspective, they explore ideas of home, growth, kinship, transformation, and construction of self.


K Shanks
homewardbound
2025
Sculpture, print, installation, performance


SHELL (interior detail), welded steel bound in cotton rope, 2025

Home is What You Carry with You: Los Angeles and New Orleans, Linocut, 2024

Lifecycles: IMAGO, steel, the artist’s deconstructed and woven feminine clothing, 2025