ABOUT THE ARTIST
KAT KELLY
Kat Kelly is a Cork based Irish visual artist, working in collage/assemblage, mark making, print media, text and installation.
Taking her own personal mythology as a starting place, her practice acts to explore themes of otherness, the unconscious and identity through a psychological, archetypal lens. Varied disparate references are brought together drawing from Irish illumination and artefacts, dreams, nostalgia and queer counterculture, which are transformed into tools for both intimate and collective storytelling. Artworks often incorporate aspects of surrealism fused with expressive, gothic, erotic and macabre elements that seek to evoke the primal, the ceremonial and the ritualistic. The works function primarily as sites of rupture and dislocation between the internal state and the outer world, acting figuratively to explore a compulsive need to release, by bringing into visibility what is hidden.
She graduated from Limerick college of Art and design in 2009 and has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Recent exhibits include Hidden Pasts, Potential Futures (2024) The Lord Mayors Pavilion, Cork IE; With other matters (2022) Roscommon Arts Centre, Roscommon IE; Hers that illumine (2021) A4 Sounds, Dublin IE (installation); Echoes of Past Sorrows (2019) The Crypt, St Luke’s Church, Cork (solo).