Kiah Celeste

Lives and works in Louisville, KY, USA

Artist statement

I am a multi-dimensional artist born and raised in Brooklyn. My most recent work transforms industrial and painterly forms into abstraction with unconventional recycled materials, variable color and experimentative process to make 3-dimensional works. Although I hold an academic background in photography and art history, this work has been a self nurtured endeavor. All of my work is made exclusively with repurposed, recycled items - stressing the cruciality of sustainability in our world, and negating the gratuitous nature of buying new, synthetic materials only to enter into inevitable disorder as time progresses. This should be exercised in daily life, especially including our creative practices, as artists we are not exempt. There are many reasons for this approach, based in practicality but accompanied by the pure joy of finding a gold mine of free and elegant forms in a heap of discarded, forgotten waste, and then creating out of the ashes a brand new form. The uses are literally infinite. Finding and using these objects gives them a new purpose, a function I facilitate in their benefit. Without fabrication or alteration, I allow these objects to use the autonomy they are bestowed with by their physical qualities. Using their weight, flexibility, grip, height etc. to my advantage, they become an object of affection, texturally and aesthetically pleasing, retiring their original practical functions. My ongoing series, ‘I Find This Stable’ has become the basis of the...

Artwork