Kel Mur

Kel Mur

Kel Mur grew up in New Jersey, graduated Cum Laude with a BA in Fine Art from Monmouth University in 2011, and received the Creativity in Studio Art Award for her senior honors thesis, Commodity. After her undergraduate studies, she relocated to New Orleans to develop her studio practice. Kel Mur has shown in many locations around the United States including: La Femme at the New Orleans Art Center curated by Don Marshall, New Orleans, LA; Women’s Work in the Cyrus M. Running Gallery, Moorehead, MN; Internal/External at the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri, Cape Girardeau, MO; and WHY MOM at Commonwealth Gallery, Madison, WI. She also curates and collaborates with different chefs in her ongoing project Feast: A Performative Art Dinner. Kel Mur has had artwork published in BARED: Contemporary Poetry and Art on Bras and Breasts (La Femmes Folles, 2016) and HOOT Online Magazine (November 2013, Issue 25). She is a member of the Catalyst Collective of New Orleans, an art and social action initiative in New Orleans and frequently volunteers for Mama Maji, a New Orleans based non-profit that funds water projects and entrepreneurial training for women in Kenya. Kel Mur earned her MFA at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in the Spring of 2020 and currently resides in Madison, WI. 

Artist Statement

I define myself as a conceptual artist intrigued by the physical body’s ephemera and its relationships to trauma, intimacy, memory, and society.  Much of my work concentrates on the body and its position in the world or how we relate to each other in these bodies.  My art practice swings between an inner and an outer sphere in ways that parallel and intersect media, making, and performance simultaneously. 

Performances of mine include the Feast project, a series of performative art dinners in collaboration with different chefs challenging them to tell stories about menstruation through food.  My objects often incorporate assemblage or casting techniques, such as the installation The Only Way is Through which uses the daily ritual of bathing to talk about the intersection of grief and heredity through wax body castings and plaster carving.

I investigate what it means to live in my body, and how my experiences and socially constructed expectations sculpt it. Providing my body’s residue in the art-making process creates an intimate encounter for my viewer with the work that toes the line of consent and unease.  I am interested in this push and pull of being, and like to dwell in that sometimes uncomfortable space.

Through my performance and relational work, I invent arenas that bring the viewer close to me or others through direct contact, the presentation of objects, or through participation in ritual.  My overarching goal is to initiate discourse that creates intimacy between strangers in a way that destigmatizes ideas surrounding the body thus creating stronger connections with ourselves and each other.

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