Kecia Deveney on balancing being an artist who makes “weirdos” with being a fulltime caregiver

Kecia Deveney's artwork (clockwise from top left - click for more detail ): one of her healing dolls; her "not perfect doll;" a visual piece called "Life"; and a "think sideways" art doll. (All photos courtesy of and © Kecia Deveney from keciadeveney.com)

Somehow it’s easy to forget for a certain kind of person that mixed-media artwork like the dolls of Kecia Deveney, rich in character and eschewing the most traditional notions of beauty, can seem askew from both the commercial and fine arts worlds.

Maybe it’s because there’s examples of work like Deveney’s in pop culture — work treasured for having unique sensibilities, a touch of the “dark fairy tale” aesthetic, that is the stuff of some big properties. Work in that vein is but a piece of a big whole dominated by commercial juggernauts in which aesthetics with texture, like stop-motion animation and even hand-drawn animation, have become rarer and rarer.

“It's also kind of a little sad if you think about it,” said Deveney, 60, in an early November interview, “the fact that in modern terms of what's going on today – AI and stuff like that – art's just so generic, it's missing its soul and with that, this generation now … they don't know what they're missing because they haven't experienced it. And no one's really taught them about it. And so when I show people my work and they’re like, ‘Oh, that's so interesting’ … kind of meaning like it's just a little weird for them because it's not normal, not mainstream. Not what they're used to seeing.

“It's sad that handmade stuff has just sort of gone to the very bottom of” what people think of as art, Deveney said.