Kelly Watson

  “My Broken Bleeding Heart”

Magnolia wood, Apple wood, Silk, Reused holiday ribbon, 

Tulle, Usnea lichen 2025

How much do we know before it happens? How much of our grief is present and processing before our loved ones die? How do you reconcile the deep love, and hurt, of complicated familial relationships once you are the only one left?

I started this piece 2 months before my dad died, two days before my birthday. 

Many pieces had been slowly forming but the pattern was not fully present until 2 weeks after his passing. I grieve with the trees, I watch their limbs twist and stretch and sigh and I am in awe of their beauty. I surrender myself to the longing, to the feeling not perfectly whole, even my muscles are sieves of grief, my threadbare heart burdened with constant ache. The threads of my lineage fall apart, empty space echoing across ages.

This piece is love, for what is heartache but the longing of the deepest love. 

 Artist Bio

Kelly Elizabeth Watson's site-reactive material-driven sculptures, paintings, and installations are a dialogue with the seasons, cycles and biological inhabitants of the living world. She masterfully uses color and form to convey her message while manipulating perception of scale and space. An observer of the pattern and processes of nature, skillfully mapping the connections between self, both past and present.

Her work focuses our experiences of systemic trauma, grief, change, and the ways in which we other the natural world, through the lens of modern motherhood and femininity: how we carry our personal and collective trauma and reflect it onto the world around us and how that is a reflection of the natural processes of growth and decay. Textiles, fibers, inks, wood, paint; woven, painted, or sewn together, bring naturally hand-wrought beauty inside to soften the disconnect between our urban existence and the nature just outside our doors.