Kelly Thompson has lived and worked in California, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. This mobile and nomadic life informs her research as an artist involved in contemporary fibres/textiles as an expanded field within in art discourses. Before joining Concordia in early 2009, she was head of the textiles program at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK and spent a decade as a senior lecturer and program manager at the Otago School of Art, in Dunedin, New Zealand. She has a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and a MA Visual Arts, from the Canberra School of Art, Australian National University.
Over the past 25 years her work has explored aspects of family and personal narratives, travel and material culture read through postcolonial theory, textile practices as signifiers of place and identity and notions of visual touch, signs, order, mapping, surface and structure relationships in objects and installations. Recent interests include translation and language, site and traces, migration, mobility and textiles as part of broader cultural, geopolitical and environmental contexts. Her artistic practice is achieved through intersections of digital imagining and material engagement with traditional weave and fibres construction, print, dye and electronic jacquard weave technologies.
Her artworks have been exhibited in curated and juried exhibitions in Canada, USA, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand. Her work is in public collections in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and in New Zealand and Indonesia, along with numerous private collections internationally.
Education
BFA California College of Arts and Crafts, 1984
MA (Visual Arts) CSA, Australian National University, 1994
Areas of expertise
Fibre materials, structures, digital and analog weave, including computer-assisted jacquard, print and dye processes, hand construction skills.
