Kelsey Cruz-Martin
b. 1991, Fremantle, Walyalup, Western Australia
Lives and works in Bath
A Shell Stood for Zero , 2026
Kelsey Cruz-Martin is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores experiential knowledge, voice, and the relationship between language and the body. Working across writing, sculpture, sound, and installation, she creates environments that invite deep listening. Her work often references states of heightened perception, including strange encounters, bodily boundaries and thresholds.
Writing is the point of departure for her work. She is drawn to the power of language and its inherent fallibility—what exceeds articulation, what remains ineffable, ambiguous, or atmospheric. Her practice focuses on the transition between written and spoken word, and the slippages between speech and sound.
Cruz-Martin treats voice as material: something with weight, texture, and malleability. At times the voice adopts a confessional tone, at others, it becomes detached, collective, or factual. Her works engage repetition, fragmentation, and nonlinear structures, combining original text with found and overheard language, sourced from stories written and read aloud. Using cut up, texts are made rhythmic and assembled into streams of consciousness that oscillate between sense and nonsense.
Grounded in material exploration, her sculptural practice investigates the dialogue between body and material, where one mirrors and transforms the other. Through experimentation in foundries, she uses ceramic shell and lost wax casting processes to transform metal into enduring replicas of the natural world. Focusing on the properties and behaviours of materials, she uncovers their uncanny resonances with the human body.
Kelsey Cruz-Martin was awarded the Freelands Studio Fellowship at Cardiff Metropolitan University (2025/26). Solo exhibition: A Flowing Body of Snake, SHIFT, Cardiff, 2023. Selected exhibitions include Invisible Foundations, Form ICA, Bath, 2025; Frame: Friday’s Fable Releases Anxiety in the Mosh pit of Empowerment, East Window, Boulder, Colorado, USA, 2024; Stunning, Fierce & Yellow Vol.2, The Auxiliary, Middlesbrough, 2022.
She was awarded a Creative Grant from WECCA, 2024 and was a recipient of a-n Artist Bursary and a WEVAA R&D Bursary in 2023. In 2022, she received A Developing Your Creative Practice from Arts Council England, as well as a one-month residency at Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Scotland, 2022. She received her BA (Hons) from the Bath School of Art and Design, 2018. She is a tutor and technical demonstrator at Bath School of Art, Film & Media, and is a Director of Bath Art Depot.
