Kelsey Nolin
OSGF
Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session III
Kelsey Nolin was raised on a small farm in the Appalachian foothills of Pennsylvania, an upbringing that fostered a deep attunement to the natural world and its rhythms, as well as an appreciation for the satisfaction of manual labor. These early influences continue to shape her artistic practice today. Her work is motivated by a connection to the land, frameworks of routine and repetition, and a consistent desire for physical engagement with artistic material. Through her practice, she re-examines the familiar hills and valleys of her home by exploring how concepts of space, landscape, and memory function as aspects of place-making.
While her work remains tied to photography’s historical associations with death, time, and preservation, Nolin embraces the subjective and emotionally driven aspects of memory and experience rather than presenting photography as an objective record of reality. To create many of her pieces, she integrates organic materials collected from her home directly into the photographic process. Oscillating between varying levels of recognition and abstraction, her final images evoke emotional tonalities of loss, melancholy, and nostalgia. By engaging with both cameraless and lens-based photographic processes, Nolin expands contemporary understandings of photography while drawing attention to the expressive potential of photographic papers and chemistry.