Katrice Kelly interviewed by Margaret Yapp

Katrice Kelly interviewed by Margaret Yapp

March 2023

Edited for length and clarity

M: You work in quite a few different mediums. Can we start with a brief description of what you’re working on now, what you’ve made in the past? In general, how are things going in your art making?

K: When I first got to Iowa, I was working with hair. This was based on the struggles with my own hair. I had hair dysmorphia, which is just like body dysmorphia … I never felt like my hair was good enough. I never felt pretty or acceptable with the styles of hair I had. I was also really judgmental of other peoples’ hair. That changed a little before I got here, and I started making hair work that was more of a praise to Black hair, natural hair, to permed hair, to straight hair, curly hair, weaves, braids, all of it. A whole culture of hair. Then, I wanted to focus on the mistreatment of hair. How it got politicized and policed. There are employers who won’t hire a person because of a certain hairstyle. I started working with that, talking about the CARE act, which was passed to say that this was against the law. 

This became kind of taxing on my heart, so I jumped from that conversation about hair and just focused on the materiality and culture that surrounds hair. Like: going to get your hair braided, how long it takes, the different hairstyles you can get with braids, the versatility of hair. 

That led me more into fiber work, and that’s how I got into yarn. Once I got into yarn, I was like - ooh! Tufting! Because it was all over the internet and I was like - oh yeah, I’m gonna do that. So, I got a little tufting gun. I got deeper into tufting and realized there are so many other things you can do with it. That’s where I’m at now. Using yarn is so familiar and so comforting to me. It got me into starting to work with my dreams - because I have a lot of vivid dreams. I told you about one crazy dream last time we talked … I want to recreate that imagery from my dreams in yarn and tufting. 

M: That path makes a lot of sense - I love hearing about your movement through different materials. So, would you say your primary medium is sculpture then? Or does it feel different than that?

K: In a way… (laughs). I get teased a lot because I’m an MFA candidate in Painting and Drawing but I have not made an actual traditional paint-on-canvas painting [in the last few years]. The tufted rugs I do, I consider them paintings. I’m a mixed media artist, that’s what I would call it.

M: Has it always been that way for you?

K: Yes, but I didn’t recognize it as that. Growing up, I did a lot of drawings and paintings. I got a scholarship in undergrad for drawing and painting. But during and after undergrad, I always felt this need to add things to my canvas, or make my canvas three dimensional in some way… nailing them together, something! So, even though I’m a painter and a drawer - I’ve always been working in sculpture but didn’t really realize it. And since Iowa is an interdisciplinary program, I’m able to do everything.

M: I think the first work I saw of yours was your tufted rug work, which are obviously three dimensional, but you were displaying them like paintings. So, I definitely saw your work as some kind of middle ground. One thing I’m especially interested in with your work is your use of words. I didn’t know you wrote poetry until after we spoke a few times. Maybe you could say something about how your poetry fits in with your visual work, if at all? Maybe they’re separate … but I’ve seen you display them together in at least one project. In your project for Prompt Image + Word, you had a tufted piece and a poem together. Maybe you could speak a bit about that specific project, and then in general - 

K: I’ve always written poetry. I have times where I’ll write down my poems and they’ll be full-on poems. Then there are times where I just write down one line at a time, and maybe it’ll become a poem, maybe it won’t. I have a little composition notebook I’ve had since I was like 8. The very first poem I wrote was about getting my hair done. It’s funny because it’s talking about my cousin doing my hair, so I added to the poem. There’s some history that’s there. [Visual work and poetry together] is new in the sense that I haven’t really made it a point to put poetry with my visual work. However, I do think the poetics of storytelling, or the title of the artwork, and reliving the dreams that they’re based on … it all becomes a poem. I translate words into visual art that feels more poetic than it does direct. 

M: Back to what you were talking about in the beginning - the projects you were working on when you first got to Iowa, using hair, this project moving into tufting - are you still in the tufting phase or do you feel like you’ve moved onto something new?

K: I’m doing a little bit of everything still. I’m still working with hair, focusing on the materiality, I’ve been building small sculptures out of hair. I also have a new tufting gun that can give me different dimensions and widths of yarn that comes out of the actual surface. And I recently built two 8 foot x 8 foot canvases so that I can actually paint. Some of my recent dreams have been so vivid that I want to give them a semi-representational image. 

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M: I’d like to hear more about these dreams. Have they always played a role in your work? 

K: I’m really intrigued by the story. I surprisingly am good at relaying the story. The dream is there. And I don’t have to necessarily state that it’s a dream. Dreams have a lot of meaning to me, either because I learned it from my mom, or because I googled it and found the meaning. Dreams are really related to my spirituality - I find it really interesting to know what they’re about. But they have only recently become the subject of my work.

M: Can you say more about the role that spirituality plays in your work?

K: Intuition. Not to get all woo-woo, but my work comes from me, but it’s not necessarily determined by my thought process, it comes from a feeling that I get. There’s things beyond me: my environment, my ancestors, my family, my friends …  they’re not present, but they’re part of my work.

Katrice Kelly is an interdisciplinary artist, MFA Painting and Drawing student attending the University of Iowa. She has been making art her entire life. Katrice’s works have been influenced by cultural traditions, dream studies and rest ministries. Fibers, such as yarn and synthetic hair are the main materials used to create tactile and comforting paintings. Her goal is to create work that feels familiar to everyone.

Margaret Yapp is from Iowa City. She works as the Image + Word editor at Prompt Press. Margaret is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Center for the Book and a member of the Iowa City Poetry Advisory Council. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Second Factory, Asphalte, and elsewhere. You can read more at Margaret’s website which is margaret yapp dot com.