Artist / Maker
About
Kelly Kelly is a multidisciplinary artist working across assemblage, painting, photography, and custom electronic systems. His practice merges mechanical, textile, and electrical components into sculptural forms that examine the tension between engineered structure and intuitive, hand‑driven gesture. Kelly creates objects that behave like restrained machines — pulleys, wires, hooks, lights, and found metal elements arranged with a minimalist sensibility and a deep attention to material behavior. His work has been called a playfully dark tome of tradition and Americana.
Kelly’s artistic lineage is shaped by multiple generations. His grandmother, painter Nancy Whorf, introduced him to material curiosity and observational rigor. His great‑grandfather, American watercolorist John Whorf, established a foundation of craft and sensitivity that continues to echo through Kelly’s work. His aunt, painter and author Julia Kelly, serves as an ongoing mentor — offering critical guidance, artistic dialogue, and a contemporary extension of the family’s creative tradition.
LIVE BAIT: The illusion of Life and AI
Live Bait: The illusion of Life and AI is a series of interactive assemblages designed as lures. Each sculpture uses knobs, pulleys, switches, lights, movement, and directional cues to tempt the viewer into touching it — like bait, like a hook, like a snare. Every physical piece has an AI counterpart.
A lure, made by a machine, performing the role of an artist, assisted by an artist, following the instructions of a machine
Two separate AI models describe the work, and a third model generates a new artwork from those descriptions. Over multiple iterations, the AI version drifts and used as an inspiration for a new work — like a game of telephone — becoming something that no longer carries the original design choices or thought process, but a joint collaboration of choices and hallucinations. It becomes a lure made by a machine performing the role of an artist, assisted by an artist, following the instructions of a machine
The Work
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Live Bait
Paintings
Photography
Furnishings
Sculpture
Other Works
