On my knees through the desert repenting
Kellyann Marie, Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. Handstitched eyelet lace collage, cyanotype, free motionstitching. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Kellyann Marie
Main Space
October 13–December 19, 2026
ARTIST STATEMENT
This show is titled after Wild Geese, the Mary Oliver poem we read to my brother as he was pronounced dead on May 24th, 2025. Everyone I knew gathered around me to make this “crawling on my knees” a bearable albeit horrendous task.
My brother died and I packed up my bicycle and rode from Florida back to Kingston (seeing everyone who's ever loved me a whole seaboard wide) I kept thinking about quilts. Oh god I love to think about quilts – something about being made from what remains (my brother was a full body organ donor). They, made of second-hand, hold the evidence of many hands in collaboration in a catastrophe.
The works in this exhibition emerge from this year following my brother's death. Quilts I made of textiles I carried and tended to on the days when the desert was too much. They are stitched from grief, inherited knowledge, found materials, and the strange generosity of being carried by other people. Showing the bar where my friends cared for me, honoring my brother, really praying for the stranger that held me in their arms at an airport. People that sat beside me when there was nothing to say. These quilts show a narrative of southern poverty being negotiated in moments of care. I have often thought of crisis as something on the horizon. Climate collapse. Rising fascism. But this grief reminds me of the ways we already live inside ongoing collapse. Poverty, addiction, bureaucratic neglect, and loneliness aren't quite future catastrophes but the ordinary conditions under which people are asked to survive, and my brother didn’t.
The quilts I make ask what knowledge exists within communities who have always had to make something from almost nothing (an alligator a stand in for Florida tumult printed on a secondhand sheet in the Montana sun).
I do not know how to rebuild the world, but I know how to save scraps (my brother was a full body organ donor), and the alchemy of an almost nothing (my brother living in poverty), becoming a something (full bodied organ donor).
BIOGRAPHY
Kellyann Marie is a queer transient responding to poverty and seeking a life in the in-between by creating pockets of home, through community, through sex work, and through honoring the ephemera found there. By celebrating the second hand, they work to connect queer life-art-home-godliness. Kellyann embraces oversharing and tenderness to honor the handmade skills that make life in poverty possible. The resulting work is paintings and textiles layered with personal narrative, meeting functional objects glorious in their usefulness — always centering the mark of the hand (to be thankful to have hands and that they would be so sweet as to leave a kiss on everything they might touch).
Kellyann is a SSHRC CGS-D Fellow working towards a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. They hold a MFA from Memorial University of Newfoundland, a BFA from Florida State University, and have exhibited nationally and internationally.
THANKS + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
From the artist:
“I am thankful for my dear friend Brittany Dale who stood by me through the devastating loss of my brother, from the first phone call until now. I am thankful in all things I do for Lindsey Bailey, who walked through that whole ordeal with me, sitting in hospital chairs for hours at a time. I am thankful to a girl named Lexie who gave Eoian CPR on the side of the road such that his every organ was available for donation.
I am thankful to be under this same sky that held the exhale from my brother’s first breath.
I am thankful to be anything at all.”