Artist of the Week: Kelly Fleek a.k.a RAY

Kelly Fleek, also known as RAY, is a Seattle-based artist who works in textiles, sculpture, installation, painting, photography, film and music.

Seattle Refined: How long have you been creating? What mediums do you work with?
Kelly Fleek: I've been creating since childhood. My mother was very creative and always had excellent art supplies around, and she allowed me to try anything and everything at hand from inks to watercolors, colored pencils to calligraphy. My grandmother was a seamstress, quilter and milliner who designed her own clothes and quilts — she taught me to sew and design in early elementary school, but it wasn't until my 30s that textiles took center stage in my work. I work in textiles, sculpture, installation, painting, photography, film and music, frequently combining several mediums to one end. My current work is largely textile sculpture-based, involving large-scale biomorphic pieces that integrate sewn fabric, hand-knit and machine-knit elements, crochet and illumination. I've also spent the past several years crystalizing these pieces, which adds a vulnerability, impermanence and fragility to my work that I love.

Can you tell us about your artistic process and how the different stages work into it?
I am typically flooded with an idea that feels out of nowhere — most often inspired by a bit of nature around me or a human interaction or a combination of both. I am forever snapping photos on my phone and cataloging them for later use or altering them in some way that finds its way into a drawing or a textile sculpture. Botany and life at the cellular level have been obsessions for me since childhood and find their way into nearly everything I create — I farm lavender in Chelan and roses in the Cascade foothills and I live within the art and music worlds of Seattle and Bellingham. I have a rich tapestry of inspirations all around me to work with. Recently, while in Chelan for the lavender harvest, I became enthralled with a few abandoned spider webs in the window of the farm's cabin. I watched the wind catch the collapsed webs for days, taking photos and little videos of the drape of the textile-like forms as they shivered in the summer breeze. Once I was back in my studio, I incorporated much of what I saw into drawings for a new large-scale textile sculpture that I'm working on now. Ultimately, I am always creating, and I love working in series so I can push an idea into many different forms or feelings. All of my large-scale textiles are made with upcycled and reclaimed textiles – everything from drapes, sheets and tablecloths find their way into these pieces, and I love hunting for the perfect used textile to cut up and throw under the sewing machine. I'm currently enthralled with raw hemp cordage, and I spend countless hours knitting and crocheting tubular forms with lace and crystals hanging from them — many incorporate driftwood, bones and shells that have me walking my favorite beaches and trails to find intriguing pieces to integrate a new sculpture. It's not uncommon for me to have two or three projects going at once, floating back and forth between them and letting them inform each other.

Tell us about where your inspiration for your art comes from.
Inspiration and process are intertwined for me entirely — most of my work is immediate in the sense that an idea strikes me, and I'm hustling to either photograph or sketch what I've seen or felt, and sometimes, I stop there, and those bits of cataloged info become a world of their own. It's not uncommon for one piece to inspire another and so on — it's why working in series is often best for me to express a new pathway. I like taking time to create conversations with my work that express how I'm feeling about a certain event or emotion or how I'm interacting with the environment around me, and each conversation has a morphology all its own.

Do you have a specific "beat" you like best – nature, food, profiles, etc.?
My work is all about morphing the smallest and largest elements of life, with an emphasis on the interactions between life forms and the commonality in structure and shape of water-based life, so I am forever losing myself in gardens, woodland haunts, strolling beaches or shuffling through a craft store or hardware store, searching for a new texture of twine to cast onto my knitting needles as I translate these thoughts into form. It's often during these strolls and wanderings that my mind falls into studying the shadows and light play all around me — another deep fascination that keeps me inspired to look further around a corner, stuff my pockets full of tufts of drying seaweed to photograph in my studio later or dunk in a borax bath to see how it all crystalizes. I'm a performing and touring musician as well, and I love watching folks interact in music venues and bars. I especially love finding new bands and music to inspire me or maybe spending a night studying the fashion and textures people are wearing to a show, or the overall vibe of an event — all of these things become a library for me to peruse and ponder for inspiration.

Do you have one piece of art that means more to you or is extremely special to you?
I have two pieces that have maintained prominence for me of late. "Regeneration" is a textile sculpture I created in 2021 in the midst of the pandemic lockdowns and on the heels of losing my mother. The piece discusses the loss of the matriarchs in my life: my mother and grandmother, followed closely by the pandemic, and how that time of isolation, grief and tears both allowed and forced me to focus deeply on healing, and rebuilding my life without my elders. Borax crystals take the form of tears, jewels, and personal adornment in this piece and the base of the sculpture is the upturned crystal cake pedestal that belonged to my great-grandmother. There's everything from deer bone to baling wire, barnacles to gold and hemp twine in there. It was a truly cathartic work to create. Every stitch had me contemplating the women who helped shape my life and my art.

"All That Glitters: womb portal" is another sculpture very close to my heart, as it was a work I began just five days after having a hysterectomy and salpingectomy in February of 2022. I worked on that piece daily and feverishly for six weeks as I recovered in bed. "All That Glitters" became both a funerary piece and celebration as I processed the changes to my body, my thoughts on my gender and childbearing and the reality that the space where I'd held my children within me was gone. I felt deep sorrow, grief and mourning for that sacred space where I'd created life, yet deeply liberated from such a strange set of organs that had caused me decades of suffering — both emotional and physical. I felt suddenly free from the weight of "womanhood" and more in step with my own gender-fluidity and more myself than ever before.

What experiences in your life have affected your art the most?
That's an ever-changing landscape, to be honest, and has included everything from coming out as queer as a teen to giving birth to children and raising them, the love in my life that has helped me heal from myriad childhood traumas and continues to keep me safe, growing, processing, learning and creating from those spaces. The death of my mother at the beginning of the pandemic shook me to my core, and I am still having endless conversations about that one in my sculptures. I see no end in sight there: losing a mother, no matter the relationship, is a powerful transition in life and an experience that both allowed me to heal parts of myself that needed work and set me adrift in this world in ways I'd never imagined. I find myself continually diving into the interstices of pain and beauty, joy and sorrow, death and rebirth — ultimately, I flow with life and let my hands weave the stories.

If we want to see more of your work, where should we go to find it?
You can find my work at kellyfleek.com and Instagram @kellyfleek.

What is next for you? Anything you're working on right now that you're really excited about?
I’m incredibly excited about a huge and gorgeous new piece coming to life in my studio that debuted for the 2023 Arts A Glow illuminated arts festival in Burien and is a collaboration with one of my dearest friends and long-time collaborator Gardenia Theroux a.k.a. Blazinspace who will be creating projection mapping that interacts with my textile sculpture. They will also be creating additional sculptural elements for this one that will invite you into our world. Gardenia and I have been collaborating on illuminated textile installations since 2014, and we've really found our groove. Expect a white, ruffly textile "vessel" open at the top with projection mapping in constant flux; we allure the light with the space we hold and entrap it within crystal containers at the bottom of the piece.

I'm in the midst of a big shift in my art and music world, and it was time to express that with a name change — expect to see Kelly Fleek take a backseat to RAY: a moniker I've performed and created under for over a decade that represents many new horizons and opportunities and grounds this new chapter of my life, sewing together my creative realities.

About 'Artist of the Week': This city is packed with artists we love to feature weekly on Seattle Refined! If you have a local artist in mind that you would like to see featured, let us know at hello@seattlerefined.com. And if you're wondering just what constitutes art, that's the beauty of it; it's up to you! See all of our past Artists of the Week in our dedicated section.