Kelsey Wishik hails from the Gulf of Mexico marshlands of Southern Mississippi. Growing up immersed into nature, her creative practices emerged intuitively through creating real and imagined dialogues with the world around her through exploring the natural landscapes and resources. Over time, this exploration turned into a curiosity for global cultural traditions involving nature as a technology, higher power, and object-making as a rite of passage and way to initiate a deeper life connection. Pairing a modernist approach to composing, she also utilizes cross-cultural dialogues through art, movement, and music as resources. Her practice explores themes of consciousness, shared identity, travel, and transformation. Through sculpture, two dimensional works, music, and movement, she seeks to discover the diverse capacities of creativity as a unifying language and form of responsive intelligence. Her works have been featured internationally in solo and group exhibitions as well as at the National Museum for Women in the Art.

In two dimensional and sculptural works, I employ both abstracted and recognizable imagery to build a bridge between intuitive experience and personal/collective narrative on the subjects of energy, movement, natural systems, and consciousness. The symbolic and representational imagery in my work draws from environmental actualities: animals, plants, cells, fungi, root systems, and the contemplation of micro and macrocosmic relationships (as above, so below. As within, so without.) In both process and aesthetics, the work explores the complex interdependence of natural systems and their manifestation on microcosmic and macrocosmic scales. Performance, music, and embodied research through travel and movement practices such as yoga, contemporary dance, and martial arts serve as both instruments of engagement for the concepts I work with, and works of art in their own right. Performative work explores territories of freedom through humankind's “reconciliation with nature”. Through movement practices that function to cultivate a resilient, reverent, sustainable connection with the environment and it's inhabitant, I seek to advocate for the acknowledgment of the sentient and spiritual intelligent nature of all life. My main motivation as a performance artist is bridge-building between several realms. One realm is that of form and function. In this time, it is difficult to imagine an art practice that does not regard its use of materials, impact, and relevance to the current global situation. I wish, also, to build bridges between language barriers; both human and interspecies--where movement and energy speaks directly to the land, the sky, the body, and all other energy bodies through what I've come to call "Reciprocity Languages".