About the Artist
I'm Kelly Feltault, a multidisciplinary artist working in collage, mixed media, experimental printmaking, and textile-based processes. I received my BFA in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and completed a certification as a therapeutic community arts facilitator. Early in my career, I taught visual art at the secondary level internationally and ran the art studio for a children’s museum.
I’m also a social scientist with a PhD who spent the last 25+ years assessing the impacts of arts-in-health programs across community, nonprofit, and public health settings. From arts engagement for veterans to el sistema programs for inner city youth and everything in between. I know the power of the arts to heal and create wellbeing.
My work explores how we learn to see, value, understand, and control the world. I’m interested in how bodies, materials, and environments hold memory, sensation, and change over time, and the tension between embodied experience and systems that seek to classify and organize the living world.
Through layered, process-driven approaches, I contrast the improvised textiles, collage, drawing, and printmaking with visual languages borrowed from science and natural history used to catalog and classify the world. By stitching, fragmenting, obscuring, and reassembling, I create works that resist fixed categories and invite more relational, embodied forms of knowing. These pieces do not simply document experience; they move through it, exploring what becomes possible when knowing is allowed to remain fluid, layered, and alive.
Lived Experience Shapes the Work
Living with chronic illness altered my relationship to time, capacity, and control, changing how I engage with my creative practice.
As fatigue and uncertainty became part of daily life, my methods shifted toward slow, modular, and improvisational processes. Improv quilting, slow stitching and drawing, collage, mark making, and experimental printmaking offered ways to incorporate uncertainty and serendipity into my practice.
My embodied experience shapes my approach. I value adaptability as part of mastery, process over productivity, and dignity over fixing. The studio becomes a place to listen — to materials, to sensation, and to what the moment needs.
Crooked Path Studios Community
I founded Crooked Path Studios as a therapeutic arts community for women navigating rare and complex chronic illness like MCAS, POTS, hEDS, EDS, Long COVID, Sarcoidosis or other rare, hard-to-name, hard-to-diagnose conditions.
This community and the creative practices honor the realities of rare chronic llness. It's a place where creativity is about process, possibility, and the somatic experience. Because we see art as a rehearsal for the uncertainty of chronic illness.
My background in arts and health research, social impact programs, and social prescribing means this is grounded in more than just good vibes--it's evidence-based and heart-led.
The community lives on Substack and you can find the creative practices on YouTube.