About Kim Keelor
"My intention is to compel the mind and enliven the spirit
while supporting planet health and constructive mindsets."
Kim Keelor, Carolina Artworks
Much of my work is fiber-based, often including the ancient process of wet felting wool. Wet felting connects me with humanity going back hundreds of generations, which makes it especially compelling to me. These pieces often include raised sculptural features and are crafted using only soap, hot water, layout ingenuity, and rigorous handwork. The wool is manipulated, sometimes for hours, until the individual fibers join permanently becoming one textile. Felted wool is strong and can last a lifetime, much like a tapestry. Additionally, I have transitioned almost entirely to fiber art over painting because fiber work uses sustainable and recycled materials that have a lower impact on the environment.
My fine felted artwork can be flat like a painting, 3-D, or a presented as a combination of forms arranged as an installation. My pieces are often designed to incorporate elements such as basket weaving or needle punching. Additionally, I often integrate vintage or found objects to transform the fiber art into assemblages, conveying more about the mood or moment in time I wish to project.
My work can be viewed in exhibitions and in my studio. It is sold via this website, in the Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center Mercantile, and at locations listed below. I accept commissions when time permits, if the request fits within my artistic style.
Additionally, I teach wool felting classes and workshops at the Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center (where my studio is located), Uptown Gallery and the Stecoah Valley Center in North Carolina, and at Middleton Place National Historic Site and the Inn at Middleton Place in Charleston, and the North Charleston Cultural Arts Center in South Carolina. I provide classes at other locations and for special or private events upon request.
Biography
Kim Keelor is a fiber artist living in the mountains of far western North Carolina, and a resident artist at the Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center there. Her work has been selected for twenty juried exhibitions since she began showing professionally in 2020. She was awarded the Best of Show prize at the Palmetto Hands Fine Craft 2024 Annual Juried Exhibition, also earning Honorable Mention and Traveling Show prizes there in earlier years. Her work has been exhibited or sold at the Bascom and the Fine Arts League of Cary gallery in North Carolina; the Middleton Place Museum Shop, Charleston Artist Guild and Preservation Society of Charleston in South Carolina and locations in Georgia.
Keelor’s most recent work, a mixed fiber installation titled Tawney, Bourgeois, O'Keeffe, and the Hats of the Master Potter, exhibited at the Bascom in a juried exhibition. It incorporates design elements from artists who influence her practice, including the 85-year-old local master potter who challenged her to make something from a bag of old wool hats he wore decades and stored in his barn.
Keelor is currently leading a collaborative, large-scale, climate crisis art installation being constructed in her studio that began in the fall of 2023; partially funded by a N.C. Arts Council grant to be exhibited in the Carolinas in 2025 and 2026.
Keelor intends to compel the mind and enliven the spirit while promoting planet health and positive mindsets. She strives to master the ancient textile process of wet felting wool and teaches felting in the Carolinas.
Resume
Kim Keelor is largely self-taught, influenced over a lifetime spent living in the southeastern United States. She currently splits her time between Franklin, North Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina and has lived in Nashville, Tennessee; Dallas, Texas; Louisville, Bowling Green and Paducah, Kentucky; New Orleans and Lake Charles Louisiana, and Tampa, Florida. Her studio is in the Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center in Franklin.
Painting in watercolor and oil, for much of her life, Keelor's practice became more intentional beginning in 2018, with cultivation in multiple mediums from instructors at the John C. Campbell Folk School, Taos Art School, Redux Art Center, Gibbes Museum of Art, and Southeastern Fiber Fair, resulting in a heavy emphasis on the ancient process of wet felting. In 2022, Keelor completed an artist residency with the Working Artist Studio Provisions of Scotland on the Isle of Skye to integrate her artwork more fully with nature, and to mark the transition from her earlier careers to full-time visual artist.
Keelor began showing her work professionally in 2020 with pieces selected for more than twenty juried competitions in cities in North and South Carolina, Savannah and Dunwoody, Georgia, and San Francisco, resulting in several awards, including Best of Show in the South Carolina Palmetto Hands Fine Craft Juried Exhibition (2024). Additionally, Keelor’s work is or has been exhibited or sold in The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts, the Middleton Place Museum Shop, Preservation Society of Charleston Shop, Charleston Artist Guild Gallery, Anderson Arts Center, Blue Ridge Arts Center, Uptown Gallery and CorkHouse Gallery.
Examples of Keelor’s artistic influences include Lenore Tawney, Vanessa Barragao, Georgia O'Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, and Pam DeGroot. Her art practice is also influenced by the spectacles she witnessed while working as a journalist covering natural disasters and crime, and by some of the events she helped manage as a strategic communications professional. Keelor holds a B.A. in journalism from Western Kentucky University and an M.S. in Leadership Studies from The Citadel.
Exhibitions, awards, grants
2024 – Tawney, Bourgeois, O'Keeffe and the Hats of the Master Potter, The Bascom
2024 – Best of Show Award, Becoming Iron: Josephine and Betty, South Carolina Palmetto Hands Fine Craft Annual Juried Exhibition, North Charleston, SC
2023 – Land, Water, Wind: Isle of Skye, The Bascom Annual Member Show, juried, Highlands, NC
2023 – Convergence: Land, Water Wind, Isle of Skye, South Carolina Palmetto Hands Fine Craft Annual Juried Exhibition, North Charleston, SC
2023 – Land, Water, Wind: Isle of Skye, Palmetto Hands Fine Craft Annual Juried Exhibition, North Charleston, SC
2023 – Grant, $1000, Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center with The Center for Craft
2023 – Land, Water, Wind: Isle of Skye. Arts League of Cary Annual Juried Exhibition, Cary, NC
2023 – Dr. Brown Knows, Summerville South Carolina Public Works Center Fiber Exhibition, Summerville, SC
2022 – First Place in category, Victory Garden Renewal, Southeast Animal Fiber Fair, Asheville, NC
2022 – Victory Garden Renewal, Chattahoochee Weavers Guild, juried, Dunwoody, GA
2022 – Common Journeys, Charleston Artist Guild Exhibition, juried, Charleston, SC
2021 – Shem Creek Shrimper, Corkhouse Gallery, Small Works exhibition, juried, Savannah, GA
2021 – Miniature Rainbow Row, Corkhouse Gallery, Small Works exhibition, juried, Savannah, GA
2021 – Dr. Brown Knows, South Carolina Palmetto Hands Fine Craft Annual Juried Exhibition, North Charleston SC
2021 – Abstruse Spaces, Redux Contemporary Art Exhibition, juried, Charleston, SC
2021 – Carolina Reverb, Anderson Arts Center Fiber Exhibition, Juried, Anderson, SC
2021 – Carolina Reverb, North Charleston Artist Guild Pop Up Juried Exhibition, North Charleston, SC
2021 – Carolina Reverb, South Carolina Palmetto Hands Fine Craft Annual Juried Exhibition, North Charleston, SC
2020 – Windowbox Colors, Blue Ridge Arts Center Annual Juried Exhibition, Seneca, SC
2020 - Leveling the Bubbles, Redux Art Center Juried Exhibition, Charleston, SC
2020 – Honorable Mention, Reaching up on Church Street, South Carolina Palmetto Fine Craft Art Annual Juried Exhibition
2020 – Traveling Exhibition Award, Reaching up on Church Street, South Carolina Palmetto Fine Craft Annual Juried Exhibition
2020 – Shem Creek Swinger, South Carolina Palmetto Fine Craft Annual Juried Exhibition
2020 – Leveling the Bubbles, SIY Gallery, San Francisco, online/juried
2020 – Mama K’s Table, Pickens County Museum of Art and History Annual Juried Exhibition
