Former Educator turned Wood worker

Kiera Rahming-Reed is an interdisciplinary artist and former educator based in metro Atlanta whose practice explores constructed identity, emotional inheritance, and the layered complexities of healing through mixed media portraiture and assemblage. Working across wood, collage, wallpaper, paper, paint, and sculptural relief, she creates psychologically charged portraits that investigate the tension between visibility and concealment, beauty and emotional weight. Originally rooted in woodworking, Rahming-Reed developed a distinctive visual language through hand-cut wood surfaces embedded beneath painted compositions, using material depth as a metaphor for the unseen layers of selfhood. Her evolving practice now incorporates collage and decorative patterning as forms of emotional architecture, drawing from domestic interiors, symbolism, and memory to examine how identity is shaped by both personal and inherited environments. Centering Black women and Black queer experiences, her work invites viewers into spaces of reflection, vulnerability, and transformation. Through flattened graphic forms, dimensional textures, and layered materials, Rahming-Reed constructs figures that feel both iconic and deeply intimate, suspended between protection, performance, and becoming. A self-taught artist with over a decade of experience in education, Rahming-Reed approaches art making as both storytelling and inquiry, using material experimentation to explore resilience, emotional complexity, and collective healing. Her practice continues to expand toward immersive and spatially driven works that merge portraiture, sculpture, and installation. Learn more about the scroll saw process here: