About Kim Keelor
Kim Keelor is a multimedia artist creating dynamic, wool-based artworks through an ancient fiber art technique. They are durable and will last for lifetimes, much like tapestries. Her intention is to compel the mind and enliven the spirit while supporting planet health and constructive mindsets. Additionally, Keelor paints in watercolor and oil.
Keelor offers wool felting classes at Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center and Uptown Gallery in Franklin, North Carolina, and at Middleton Place National Historic Site and the Inn at Middleton Place in Charleston, South Carolina. Her work is sold at those and other locations listed below, and via this web gallery.
Kim Keelor is largely self-taught, influenced over a lifetime spent living in the southeastern U.S. She currently splits her time between Franklin, North Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina and has lived in Nashville, Tennessee; Dallas, Texas; Louisville, Bowling Green and Paducah, Kentucky; New Orleans and Lake Charles Louisiana, and Tampa, Florida.
Painting in watercolor and oil, for much of her life, Keelor's practice became more intentional beginning in 2018, with cultivation in multiple mediums from instructors at the John C. Campbell Folk School, Taos Art School, Redux Art Center, Gibbes Museum of Art, and Southeastern Fiber Fair, resulting in a heavy emphasis on the ancient process of wet felting. In 2022, Keelor completed an artist residency with the Working Artist Studio Provisions of Scotland on the Isle of Skye to integrate her artwork more fully with nature, and to mark the transition from her earlier careers to full-time visual artist.
Keelor began showing her work professionally in 2020 with pieces selected for 19 juried competitions in locations including North and South Carolina, Savannah and Dunwoody, Georgia, and San Francisco, resulting in several awards. Additionally, Keelor’s work is or has been exhibited or sold in The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts, the Middleton Place Museum Shop, Preservation Society of Charleston Shop, Charleston Artist Guild Gallery, Anderson Arts Center, and Blue Ridge Arts Center, Uptown Gallery and CorkHouse Gallery.
Examples of Keelor’s artistic influences include Lenore Tawney, Annie Albers, Vanessa Barragao (Portugal) and Pam DeGroot (Australia). Her art practice is also influenced by the spectacles she witnessed while working as a journalist covering natural disasters and crime, and some of the events of crisis she helped manage as a strategic communications professional including an historic flood in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a B.A. in journalism from Western Kentucky University and an M.S. in Leadership Studies from The Citadel.
Artist Statement
My intent is to compel the mind and enliven the spirit through work serving as meditations on nature, common journeys, and uncommon sights while supporting planet health and constructive mindsets.
My practice is evolving to embrace more fiber components; thus, I am currently working to master the process of wool felting. The textural superiority and versatility of wool, the tension or flow I can create with it, and the sustainability of the organic fiber captivate me. Wool felting, mankind’s oldest textile creation process, energizes my creations by linking them more directly and cleanly with nature than did paint, creating a quiet alliance with hundreds of generations of makers before me. I often integrate elements like basket weaving, or with found objects forming assemblages magnifying the mood or movements I hope to convey.
Recently, my work centers on exploring how to express the movement and transformation of natural water sources with wool, recycled silk, cotton, and jute. In particular, the waterfalls of the Nantahala National Forest where I live are represented in my experiments as I observe the changes from a robust flow to a drought-driven trickle due to the planet's climate emergency. These efforts are leading me to expand the scope and scale of my pieces in the hopes of communicating a call to action for viewers of my more serious work, imploring them to invest examine their own lives and businesses for ways to improve climate health. Additionally, I have an ardent desire to begin collaborations on this front with other makers in the Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center community in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina where my studio is located. I see this as a pivotal next step in my practice.