Kately Towsley’s work responds to place, exploring memory and relationships through practices of noticing and slowness. Her artmaking is an inquiry-driven process that examines the human experience: experiences inspiring inquiry, inquiry locating concept, concept and material guiding each other to determine process. These cyclical elements lead to acts of acknowledgement, rituals of remembering, and gestures of lament, becoming, and care. Towsley returns to fiber processes, performance, and poetry as enduring languages of expression. She connects with processes of collection, intentional labor, and fragmentation, working with plant fibers, clay, threads, found cloth, words and images, family ephemera, and movement-actions that evoke both the mundane and the ceremonial to create a new whole, establish connections, process events and sensations, and invite linger and reflection.

In dreaming and in waking, Towsley attends to life’s tensions: beauty and grief, abundance and scarcity, care and destruction, privilege and inequity. Manifesting through installations, writing, performances, and object making, she explores how individual and collective stories coexist and how her personal history sits within the larger context of the world. She asks: Who are we? What are we doing here? What are we given, and what will we leave behind? These questions are held not only conceptually, but materially— through an interdisciplinary approach that listens to and layers in memory work, site-specificity, repetitive labor, and durational making.