Kately Towsley is an interdisciplinary visual artist currently based in Chicago, USA
Artist Statement
Kately Towsley makes work about the human experience. Engaging with topics of memory and social justice, she is interested in collective and individual narratives.
Towsley treats the process of making as a time of contemplation, sometimes worship. Her work shares personal inspection while provoking the viewer’s own thoughts, experiences, knowledge, or lack thereof on a subject. She favors methods that are detail-oriented, tedious, and involved in order to imbue the work with a greater sense of intention and presence. Most often the subject matter she chooses to explore informs the materials and medium she uses to create a work. Towsley frequently utilizes fiber, ceramics, and botanical matter in her sculptures and installations, and integrates other disciplines such as performance, photography, and printmaking.
Towsley's work is a product of personal learning and exploration. Her work is an investigation seeking to educate and commemorate: a making in response to questions she has, musings, reflections, convictions, or realizations that she does not know enough about a critical history, or current event. There are times Towsley makes in order to document, others to help her spiritually or emotionally process, and others still where her work is a ritual—an act of making inspired by grief, mourning, awe, appreciation, or joy.
Education & Experience
Master of Fine Arts Candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2024 - Present
Teaching Assistant at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2024 - Present
Studio Assistant for Jesse Krimes' Artist Studio, Doylestown, PA, 2024
Resident Artist at Olivet Church Studios, Philadelphia, 2023 - 2024
Teaching Artist at Keystone Creative Goods, Philadelphia, 2023 - 2024
Back to Basics Residency at Arteles Creative Center in Haukijärvi, Finland, August 2023
Teaching Artist at Second State Press, Philadelphia, Summer 2023
Independent Study at the Clay Studio, Philadelphia, Spring 2023
Fob Holder Residency at Second State Press, Philadelphia, Spring 2023
Resident Artist at the Woodland Annex with Resurrection Philadelphia, 2023
Member with Da Vinci Art Alliance, 2023 - 2024
Member with the Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA), 2023 - 2024
Artist Member at One For All Studios, Philadelphia, 2022
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art, Oklahoma State University, 2017-2021
Program Assistant at the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, 2018-2021
Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) Internship Recipient, Bay Shore, NY, Fall 2020
-- unable to participate in the internship program due to COVID-19 pandemic --
Perennial Visions V, Da Vinci Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA, 2023
Superbloom, Second State Press, Crane Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 2023
Ephemeral Partner, IMPeRFeCT Gallery, Germantown, Philadelphia, PA, 2023
Devotion to: , Second State Press, Crane Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 2023
BFA Studio Capstone Exhibition, Oklahoma State Gardiner Gallery, Stillwater, OK, 2021
Slowmentum, Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, Oklahoma City, OK, 2020
Ascendance, Modella Art Gallery, Stillwater, OK, 2019, 2020
Exhibitions
Features, Awards, Publications
Puffin Foundation Grant, 2024
Visionary Scholarship, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2024
Ira ‘Bud’ and Lucile A. Grossman Scholarship, The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, PA, 2023
Clare Hart De Golyer Memorial Fund, Dallas Museum of Art, TX, 2020
Barbara Chitwood Art Appreciation Scholarship, Oklahoma State Art Department, 2020
Goldston Scholarship, Oklahoma State Art Department, 2020
Albricias the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese magazine, Vol. 60, No. 2, 2016
Albricias the AATSP magazine, Vol. 59, No. 2, 2015
a prayer
for those who make
O God who in your good providence
did deposit in this world
treasuries of metal and wood, stone and clay
pigments and oils, parchments and fibers—
that we who are created in your image
might from those materials make
and build and craft objects and structures
both beautiful and useful, for the meeting
of physical needs and for the nurturing
of soul and spirit—quicken now
my hands,
my ability,
my knowledge,
and bless this work of creation that
by my labors I might craft a thing that sings
with the very substance of my hope.
I am here to rehearse the New Creation
in the making of this thing.
Breathe, O God, into my lifeless works
that they might somehow hold
in their feeble forms
such angles and fragments and rumors
of the fire of the glory
that is already made ready and waiting
to burst forth from the seams of
creation’s old garment—
when you but speak the word—
and all things sin-soaked and subject to futility
will be suddenly unsodden and revealed in their
truer forms in a new turning of the light,
now resurrected, now shed of
the great groan of the world, now displaying
in the full measure the glory they were intended
to hold at their first crafting.
I am here to rehearse the New Creation
in the making of this thing.
Listen, all who labor—
and my own hands and heart also—Hear!
Hear heaven’s tidings now tolled as hammer
rings, saw strums, and chisel strikes:
The hours and years you spend in this toil
of mastering your imperfect crafts—
for joy in the nature and the working
of these good elements;
for joy in the beauty of the things created;
for knowledge of God’s good pleasure
at the evidence of his image reflected
in us, and of our images reflected
in what we make; for expression
of love in this slow and obedient fashioning
of pleasing and durable items
to do good service to generations;
and for the offering of arts and
eloquent objects which whisper to the
souls of their beholders stirrings of
eternal things that words cannot convey—
To all who toil in the crafting of such
elements, hear these tidings:
Those hours and labors are not lost!
What you have worked is more than it
now seems. The economy of creation is
backloaded and sits on springs. What you
have made will one day be unveiled, unleashed,
take wing, or glow with glory coursing from
that cracked chrysalis you had fashioned in
defiance of the deep shadows of this age—
and in that turning of the page will raise
our voices in chorus and say:
In defiance of the curse, we had been
rehearsing all along the New Creation
in the making of these things.
So now, Creator Spirit, unto that day,
quicken my hands; enliven my imagination.
Mediate my labor; offer inspiration.
With intention, in this shaping, may I love well
those who in the end will benefit by the thing
well-made and useful for their journey.
Accept this undertaking. May my making
now be rendered as an act of worship, O Lord,
that the care with which I craft this thing to
be both beautiful and lasting should stand in
affirmation of your covenantal acts.
And so may the thing I here create,
even in its imperfection,
yet be an object bearing witness to the promise
that all things will be made new, a firstfruits
offering to you, from my own hand.
Amen.
