Kellie Lehr
What does it mean to fold? Folding can involve many things in both art and life—everything from DNA to our skin folds. There’s an embodiment that speaks to change, time, and space. Mathematically, folding helps us solve problems. In day-to-day life, it helps us organize chaos. My latest series of works focuses on the use of raw canvas, exploring alternative ways of presenting paintings and utilizing the simple act of folding. The work consists of abstract paintings, soft sculptures, and soft books made with ink, charcoal, acrylic, and oil on raw canvas. I start with an unstretched cotton canvas that I fold, ink, wash, and dry outside in the sun. The folding is slow, methodical, and tactile, not exalted. It speaks to the everyday activity of living in the world. It also contains tension. Areas are hidden and revealed, patterns made and disrupted, and mistakes embraced. I’m interested in how frequencies, patterns, and gestures can create a UX of time and space, and how the canvas holds a memory of its previous dimensional states. I see painting as both a performative action and a ritual where I am a co-creator in the process. Other movements and artists inform this process: Supports/Surface, Neo-Concrete(Lygia Clark), Pattern and Decoration, Color Field, and Feminist Performance Art (Mierle Laderman Ukeles). The process of folding is physical and feels intimate. Folding, unfolding, and refolding is a repetitive process. A pattern emerges. There are innate ways to fold, and although my materials are humble, the options feel limitless.
Kellie Lehr is a visual artist working at the intersection of painting and sculpture. Her practice engages raw canvas as both surface and structure—folded, stretched, layered, or left to hang freely. Through these shifting forms, she explores themes of memory, impermanence, and transformation. Lehr often incorporates inherited fabric and hand-worked materials, embedding unseen acts of labor and care into the work. Drawing from expanded painting and textile traditions, her pieces range from wall-based sculptural forms to intimate works on paper, embracing the tension between control and intuition, geometry and gesture. Lehr holds an MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design in Cambridge, MA. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as MASS MoCA (MA), Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (AR), 21c Museum Hotel (AR), and Manifest Gallery (OH). She has been awarded residencies at Château d’Orquevaux (France), Foundation House (CT), and Millay Arts (NY), and was selected for the 2023–25 Juried Registry of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Voices from the Gate, 86 x 27 x 6 inches, Acrylic, glitter, ink, chain belt, painted leather, headphones on raw canvas, 2021
