Artist Statement:

I am an interdisciplinary artist who employs drawing in many forms to explore themes including childhood, womanhood, the self, the body, relationships, memory, grief, hope, and healing.  As artists, we know drawing to be an act of observation, seeing, and technically rendering. However, one can draw a bath, draw blood, draw poison out, draw a conclusion. My recent work draws from a variety of media and subjects from art history. I use the figure as a mark, and the body as practice, along with my personal symbology, gestures, and movements to form my visual language.

While my work is centered on expressionist figurative art, I am equally fascinated by the act of creating, viewing the action itself as a type of performance, ritual, dance, and play. Alchemy. With that being said, site specificity; time, space, atmosphere, play a key role. Play is the foundation of my practice. I collaborate and dance with the media, listening to its voices and communicating with its history. My explorations are processes of play and observation, sometimes reaching back to my own girlhood. I believe that play is the utmost work of humans, enabling individuals to understand the present moment and metabolize past experiences. Recently, I have shifted the focus of my explorations to broader art history while continuing to engage with myself as the subject, the artist as subject. I believe that in the act of creating, we usher in our future and in turn simultaneously heal our past. I desire to immerse the viewer in a world imbued with the evocative aroma of a longed-for history and a described future, drawn from the muse’s perspective.

Eu sou Kinsey Fitzgerald (de Abreu).

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Artist Bio:

Kinsey Fitzgerald (b. 1993, U.S.A) is an artist, doula, and educator who lives and practices in Urbana, Illinois. She recently graduated from Eastern Illinois University with her MA in Studio Art where she focused on the technical aspects of drawing and painting, specifically figure drawing (with Professor Jenny Chi) and color theory (with Chris Kahler).  She graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017 with her BFA in Craft  with a concentration on Ceramic Sculpture.

While there, she also studied a variety of disciplines, including life drawing, and costume design, where she helped design the costumes for November Dance (2013), which reintroduced her to dance, specifically contact improv by meeting Kirstie Simson (Total game changer, force, etc). Kinsey took dance as a little girl, but stopped due to pain and difficulty following the steps. She often would take breaks and draw in the corner of her classes.

At the University, once she met Kirstie she made sure to take classes each semester with her! At this time, Kinsey started becoming more interested in the process of making art more than the finished product, more involved with the dance that is making. A little bit after, she stepped away from school, continuing to audit these classes but eventually moving to Brazil, young and in love,  where she joined a contact improv group, Núcleo de Ação de Sustentabilidade da Comunidade do Contato in which she did a mural for, thus starting her mural career. She returned back to school eventually to finish her final semester, in which amongst the math classes she had put off she took a class on the Alexander Technique and continued with dance classes. A couple years later, she obtained a back injury leading to time taken off of movement and a long journey of asking why…

She finally received a diagnosis 5 years later, for Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, with that, many unanswered questions got their answer! And now, after many years of Physical Therapy, hard work, retraining the brain body connection (shout out to Pilates especially Lisa at Living Legacy)  she has been able to return back to Dance. She believes these were all seeds planted for this very show! She was absolutely thrilled when Kate, of the Urbana Dance Company, asked her to show her works with all this dense history connected to dance, and the beautiful space itself.

Besides all that, she has enjoyed being an artist and educator in the community here in CU. She was a preschool art teacher for many years, and now continues teaching workshops for the Young Artists Studio at Urbana Free Library. Kinsey has two Public Artworks under her belt 

Native Prairie Roses, 2022 

(A special commission from the City of Urbana, funded by Urbana Arts and Culture and private donor, Pat Sammann) as well as, her sculpture Mother and Child, 2020 ( The Great ARTdoors, granted by Spurlock Museum, the Urbana Park District, the Champaign Park District, the Urbana Arts and Culture Program, and 40 North) that was inspired her Doula Studies. Her work has been shown domestically, as well as, internationally. It is loved and kept in many private collections locally and all around the world.