Kelly Feltault

Artist Statement

My creative practice explores how seeing becomes knowing and how knowing becomes power.

Using imagery drawn from ichthyology, entomology, and anatomy, I borrow from the visual language of science: illustrations, diagrams, specimen forms, classification systems. These are images we’re trained to trust. They promise clarity, objectivity, truth. But I’m interested in how those images were—and still are—used to sort, separate, and control the living world.
Insects pinned. Fish cataloged. Bodies mapped and divided.

What begins as observation becomes classification. What becomes classification turns into systems of value, ownership, extraction, and authority.

My process disrupts that progression. I layer, tear, obscure, and reassemble. I introduce processes that resist precision: experimental printmaking, improv textiles, mark making, collage. These gestures push back against the idea that knowledge can be clean, fixed, or complete. They open space for more relational ways of knowing, ones that hold memory, are messier, embodied, and harder to control.

This work brings together themes I’ve returned to for years, now held within a clearer frame. At its core, this series asks: What if knowing wasn’t about fixing things in place? What if it could remain fluid, layered, and alive to hold memory?