Kelin Perry

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The events of the past several years have brought many of us to a place of collective understanding in an elemental, deep-in-the-bones kind of way that truly anything can happen. My current work resides in this space of the loss of innocence, where beauty and its destruction inevitably coexist. The trajectory of my life, as with most of us, has borne witness to moments of unfettered joy as well as profound loss. I have experienced guileless innocence, beauty, deterioration, and death. These elements are fundamental and irrefutable markers of my life.

I have cultivated a reverence for the unseen, discarded, and forgotten. I make use of found materials and ephemera to evoke a sense of the fragility of beauty and the passage of time. I see these elements as having their own unique spirit and life, their own heartbeat. I use paint, paper, and other media, as well, but the found objects are central to my work.

My practice as an architect for many years is integral to what I make. Three-dimensional pieces embed themselves in my work on the wall or suspend from the ceiling to tell their tales. My pieces are stories. I use my materials with reverence. Much of my work evokes or alters without insisting on this reading. The soul of my work speaks to my deep roots growing up and spending most of my life in the South. There’s blood in the soil here. I feel it and I honor it.