Kay Healy
Artist Bio:
Healy is an artist and educator originally from Staten Island, NY and received a BA from Oberlin College, and an MFA from the University of the Arts in Book Arts and Printmaking. Her 350 square foot screen printed installation Coming Home, was purchased by the Pennsylvania Convention Center in 2016. She completed a 1,000 square foot digital and screen printed fibre installation for the Central Library of Philadelphia. This project was supported by the Independence Foundation’s Fellowship in the Arts and was based on stories of lost objects from interviews of over forty people from Philadelphia and the surrounding area. Healy has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Septima in Tokyo, Japan; Pennsylvania College of Technology; Windgate Gallery at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith; The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts; the University of Alabama Huntsville; The Philadelphia International Airport; the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts; and a number of other national galleries. She was named as a West Collects winner and a Fellow in the Center for Emerging Visual Artists’ (CFEVA) Career Development Program. She was previously the recipient of the Leeway Art and Social Change grant, which funded a yearlong body of work based on interviews with refugees from Southeast Asia, and the NewCourtland Fellowship, which supported a teaching-artist project with senior citizens in Germantown. She lives and works in Philadelphia.
Artist Statement:
Over the last decade, I have created objects and installations addressing home, loss, displacement, and the relationship between people and their domestic environments. Many of these pieces are stuffed fabric screen prints of furniture from my own childhood or based on another person’s description of objects from their past. I am interested in how objects and domestic spaces can tell stories, and that something as mundane as an armchair can embody vivid memories of people, places, and events from one’s life. I strive to make visually accessible work with a handmade aesthetic, using observational drawing to create screen printed, painted, and sewn works. In my most recent series, I utilise fabric multiples and cut templates of my own limbs to create stuffed and sewn dimensional forms. This new direction includes domestic themes, while also addressing the loss, anxiety, and struggle we experience within our relationship to the built environment.
