Christopher Kelly is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, craft and design. For the past 20 years, Kelly’s practice has centred on hand-made objects and material experimentation, exploring the possibilities of compulsive creation, sensation, and embodiment through form and material.
Kelly’s work is distinguished by an extraordinary material sensibility and conceptual precision. Operating within the expanded field of fibre and textile sculpture, his practice uses tactile knowledge and haptic memory, drawing upon the slow, meditative labour of weaving, macramé, and crochet. These techniques, executed in salvaged and elemental materials—jute twine, hemp rope, cardboard, and found fibres—gesture toward a sensory language that is at once deeply personal and socially resonant.
What distinguishes Kelly’s methodology is his community engagement that is embedded into the conceptual framework of his work. Collaborations with organisations including Central Saint Martin’s Museum, Mind UK, Autism Bucks, and the Psychological Professions Network have fostered spaces for shared authorship, and the act of making becomes a mode of solidarity, agency, and mutual recognition.