About

Working across disciplines, I conduct research-based projects that take assorted forms, including installations, drawings, and photography-based series. Questions that recur across projects tend to concern landscape and the body: how we inhabit, imagine, and project meaning onto places, and how those places in turn shape how we see ourselves. I’m drawn to thresholds — the Arctic, the desert, the border zone — as much as to the textures of everyday life. Materials I use are mostly ephemeral, in sympathy with the subject matter.

My academic work has centered on women's life-writing, literary theory, and postcolonial literature. These interests are continuous with the visual work — both are concerned with how experience gets recorded, transmitted, and transformed.

Caroline E. Kelley holds a D.Phil. and M.St. in women's writing and gender studies from the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford. She has studied art at the New York Academy of Art (MFA program), the Art Students League of New York, and the School of Visual Arts. She was a Fellow in Multi-Disciplinary Research at the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation (APRAF) in Berlin. Her monograph, Women Writing War, published with Peter Lang Oxford, is part of the series, Studies in Contemporary Women's Writing, edited by Gill Rye, Professor Emeritus at the IMLR, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Her work has been exhibited and presented at galleries and museums in North America, Europe, and China. She has undertaken international residencies at The Arctic Circle, Banff Centre for the Arts, Stiftelsen Kulturhuset USF, the Santa Fe Art Institute — for which she received a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant — and the Artist Residency in Motherhood.

Originally from southeastern Massachusetts (b. 1973), she lives with her family in Lyon, France.

For a complete CV, please contact me. You can also find me here on Instagram and here on Substack.