Emily Kelly’s practice navigates structures of materiality, space, and the physicality of emotion through sculpture and site-specific installation. Within this field, a personal and decisive language emerges—one in which definitive meaning recedes and affect becomes increasingly pronounced.

Her work follows an intuitive pulse, where the intertwining of natural and industrial elements gives rise to hybrid constructions that oscillate between object and drawn image.

By concentrating on the point of contact between two or more elements, the works investigate structures of connection, boundaries, division, and unity.

Drawing their vocabulary from anatomy, the body becomes a fundamental element in the practice—both through repetitive manual labor, which reveals deviations and imperfections and through modular constructions that the artist can carry, assemble, and disassemble independently.

Within this logic, the materials themselves hold the memory of contact and the body operates as a creative criterion, accounting for the diversity and contradictions inherent in contact—contradictions necessary for the emergence of new resistances and adaptations, and for sustaining a state of constant alertness tied to mobility.

Bio.

Emily Kelly (b. 1997) is a Belgian visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. She is an alumna of The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Antwerp, and holds an MA in Fine Art Sculpture (2021) and is the recipient of the Sculpture Department Prize (2021)

Kelly has exhibited her work in both Belgium and Germany and has participated in artist residencies at Atelier 34ZERO muzeum in Brussels (2019) and Culterim Gallery in Berlin/Brandenburg (2023 and 2024). 

Her solo exhibitions include Fluid Structure in Pinkie Bowtie (2020), Plastic/Clastic in Art Partout gallery (2022), Side by side expanding in a line in the artist run collective FAAR (2022) and Types of order are forms of thought in Life is Art gallery (2023), Between Common Time in Life is Art Gallery (2025) all in Antwerp, Belgium. 

The duo exhibition SEE YOU IN MY ROOM with Gonzalo Morales Leiva in the project space of GlogauAIR (2024) and the group exhibition Fight or Flight; An exhibition about money both in Berlin, Germany (2025)