DVAA Member since 2023
Kately Towsley
Artist Website:
About:
Kately Towsley is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. She graduated with her BFA from Oklahoma State University in 2021 and moved to Spain shortly after in order to work with an organization that aimed to cultivate community & connection amongst university students in Valencia. Since then, Towsley has returned to the States to develop her art practice and cultivate her career as an emerging visual artist.
Artist Statement:
Kately Towsley engages with topics such as faith, memory, and social justice and is interested most broadly in the human experience and people’s stories. Towsley views art as an avenue of connection: introspectively a potential connection between artist and Creator, and communally as a way to connect with others.
Towsley's work is a product of personal learning and exploration. Towsley makes in response to questions she has, musings, reflections, convictions, or perhaps the realization that she didn’t know enough about something she considers important. There are times Towsley makes in order to document, others to help her spiritually or emotionally process, and others still where her work is a celebration—an act of making inspired by awe, appreciation or joy. At times Towsley's work is an intense investigation, at others an effort to simply produce beauty and make something real and tangible with her hands.
Using a wide variety of media, Towsley investigates and meditates on these themes as she creates, and then shares her findings with others through the presentation of a work. Her work shares personal inspection while provoking the viewer’s own thoughts, experiences, knowledge, or lack thereof on a subject. Often times the subject matter she chooses to explore informs the materials and media she uses to create a work. Towsley frequently utilizes fibers, found objects, and organic materials in her sculptures and installations, but also is always working in other disciplines such as photography, ceramics, and printmaking.
For Towsley, the act of making is a time of worship and contemplation. She favors methods that are detail-oriented, tedious, and involved in order to imbue the work with a greater sense of intention and presence. These methods also provide her with more space to think, process, and pray while a project comes into being.
