ABOUT

BIO
Kelley Finley is an interdisciplinary artist who primarily works in sculpture, textiles, and performance. Finley received her BFA in Sculpture from Kutztown University and her graduate degree from California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Hong Kong and Italy, and nationally in the US. Most recently, she was an Artist in Residence at Recology, SF.

ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice is constructed in the space where memory settles into material—where the ephemeral is held in what remains and the gestures we repeat. Each work begins as a response to what lingers: traces of presence, fragments of the body, and the persistence of memory. I look to historical and legal records of Chinese immigration in the places I inhabit, searching for evidence of exclusion and erasure. This research acts as both grounding and ghost—threading through the work as a subtle but insistent presence, connecting personal lineage to collective history.

I use labor, rituals, and locations in my work to explore mixed identity and embodied experience through segmentation. By utilizing my body in often performative acts while fabricating, they become archives of private performance, reminiscent of my body or family members in various positions - arms outstretched, two bodies standing beside one another, or arms raised in surrender. These imprints, specifically tied to my own and my maternal lineage, become spatial references that guide the form and presence of each work.

My sculptures function as personal shrines—structures that embrace lineage and mend loss. Ceramic, silk thread, hair, and textiles converge with unexpected materials— fluorescent vinyl, steel, and Chinese medicinal herbs—these elements are transformed through sewing, weaving, beading, braiding, and mending. The materials carry personal and cultural history; silk thread used for garments now serves as connective tissue between maternal generations, and medicinal herbs used for remedies become symbols of care and honoring. In this labor, there is a ritual, a slow, unfolding act of scaffolding memories—an architecture of what is both held and lost.