Over the past decade, my practice has moved from examining women’s roles engaging directly with the natural world and sustainability. While the materials and subjects have changed, the underlying thread — a reverence for what is often overlooked — continues to connect all my work.
Kelly Meyer
Bio
Kelly Meyer is a multidisciplinary artist and arts educator based in Central Minnesota. Her work draws from the natural world, incorporating foraged plant materials, natural dyes, and found objects to explore themes of impermanence, transformation, and connection. With roots in both painting and embroidery, Kelly’s recent work invites viewers to pause and notice the beauty in small, ephemeral moments — reflecting on cycles of life, death, and renewal through earth-centered processes.
Guided by a commitment to sustainability and social justice, her practice addresses broader issues such as climate change, gender roles, and access to the arts. Her background in healthcare and work with individuals with disabilities continue to inform her belief in art’s ability to foster empathy, healing, and inclusion.
Kelly holds a BFA in Painting from St. Cloud State University and is a multi-year recipient of both the CMAB Artist Career Development Grant (McKnight Foundation) and the Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support for Individuals grant. Her current body of work honors nature’s rhythms while encouraging deeper, more mindful engagement with the world around us.
Artist Statement
With the birth of my twins, I set aside my paintbrushes and picked up a needle and thread. What began as a practical adjustment — clean hands over pigment-stained fingers — soon grew into a quiet devotion. The slow rhythm of stitching, the sound of a needle piercing and pulling through cloth, matched the tempo of new motherhood: patient, present, and deeply personal. What felt like sacrifice became sanctuary. I found not only peace in the process, but irony in how this traditionally “feminine” craft began to reshape my visual language.
As my children grew, I returned to painting while continuing to embroider, seeking ways to blend the immediacy of brushwork with the meditative intimacy of thread. My practice has since expanded to include eco printing, natural dyeing, and papermaking — processes rooted in sustainability, slowness, and the changing seasons. Foraging for plants, stirring dye pots, and working with reclaimed materials has deepened my attention to the land and brought greater intentionality to my work.
Vintage fabrics, hand-dyed with botanical color, become the canvas for my stitchwork. These acts of transformation — cloth into story, leaf into print — speak to the cycles of growth and decay that echo throughout my practice. In nature, I collect what’s often overlooked: molted cicada shells, fallen feathers, empty hornet nests. These delicate remnants of life become quiet focal points in my compositions, inviting reflection on transience, reverence, and the beauty found in loss.
Through my work, I hope to slow the viewer’s gaze — to offer a moment of pause, of wondering. Whether in the woods or a city sidewalk, I believe the earth is always speaking — we just have to choose to listen.
Great Big Thanks!
Kelly Meyer is a fiscal year 2022 & 2023 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant for the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts & cultural heritage foundation.
