Kate Kelly

Kate Kelly is a feminist portrait painter based in Norfolk, who studied Fine Art Painting at Camberwell (MA) and the University of Brighton (BA). Her work explores intersectional feminism and biographical experiences, incorporating personal herstories from both research and practice.

Using photography and drawing to capture both staged and candid moments, Kelly translates these into paintings that hold traces of process and time. Materiality plays a central role. Working in egg tempera, watercolour, and oils, Kelly allows surfaces to remain open, layered and, at times, unresolved. Visible underdrawings, shifting paint, and areas of ‘unfinishedness’ reflect an ongoing conversation.

The women and people in her paintings are active, vocal, and physically present, with space for their narratives. Kelly examines female experience through visual means, integrating identity through patterns and the spaces her subjects occupy.

Her paintings explore subjective embodiment, portraying individuals as people with agency and presence, rather than as objects of passive observation.

For Kelly, re-examining and foregrounding female experience from women’s perspectives remains a necessary and radical act.