KU Common Work of Art

For the 2026–2027 academic year, the Spencer pairs Kay WalkingStick’s painting Winter Flight with Orbital, a novel by Samantha Harvey.

“I think our Earth is sacred. We are so much a part of this Earth, evolved to live here, in this atmosphere. I also think that the shapes in the landscape are abstract enough so that they can carry implied meaning that I can impart through that. It’s transcendent in that it can refer to the unknown, those big questions of life—birth and death and our existence here on Earth.” This quote from Kay WalkingStick not only expresses ideas conveyed through her art, but also those expressed in Orbital.

WalkingStick created Winter Flight, one of her signature diptych (two-panel) landscape paintings, in the period following her first husband’s sudden death. The more representational panel on the right evokes the surging waters of a deep gorge near the Cornell campus in Ithaca, New York, where she taught. The more abstract panel on the left reveals densely textured bands of dark black and blue paint. Together the two canvases create an emotional resonance of place.

The prize-winning novel Orbital offers a profound exploration of what it means to be human and our lives and relationships to, with, and on planet Earth. Short chapters organized by ascending and descending orbits across the span of a 24-hour day on Earth provide mediative views of life aboard a space station for six astronauts from five nations. 

The relatively small size of WalkingStick’s canvases and the cramped quarters of the spacecraft both present views of vastness and depth. As the astronauts repeatedly pass over dawning days and darkened nights (in some places brightened by human-built environments) during their many orbits around Earth, WalkingStick’s Winter Flight also traverses passages of light and dark viewed from above. The churning of grief felt in WalkingStick’s application of paint and representation of the powerful force of a waterfall evoke the awe, uncertainty, and fragility of life, themes ever-present in life aboard the space station.  The character Chie grapples with this experience when her mother passes away on Earth while Chie orbits far above in space.

Orbital’s opening paragraph resonates with the energetic flows of paint across the canvases of Winter Flight: “Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams—of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in the dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses.” The novel’s concluding phrase, “a wild and lilting world,” serves as an apt description of Walkingstick’s painting, with its thick and fluid layers of paint. 

WalkingStick’s diptych form bridges views, the two canvases creating more together than on their own. Like Earth and the solar system, they are mutually dependent. WalkingStick states: “I’ve always thought that one of the reasons for doing diptychs is that it brings together two different kinds of views. And that unity is about a human condition. It’s not about being an Indian on the planet. It’s about being a human on the planet. But it is about our relationship to the earth.” Weaving multiple vantage points and perspectives about Earth and the human condition, Harvey’s novel also expresses a longing for unity. For example, in a passage on the sense of oneness in the spacecraft: “For now at least, we are one. Everything we have up here is only what we reuse and share. We can’t be divided, this is the truth. We won’t be because we can’t be.” 

Both Harvey and WalkingStick use unconventional structures with familiar forms, the novel and landscape painting, to contemplate humanity and our relationship with Earth—wonderous, astounding, fragile—and humans’ relationships with each other. Both works raise questions about the “hurling beautiful force” of the universe and planet, and creations of nature and art. 

You can view the Common Work of Art in the Empowerment exhibition in our Michaelis Gallery.