Kelly Lloyd is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who focuses on issues of representation and knowledge production and prioritizes public-facing collaborative research. Lloyd has recently held solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy Schools (London), Crybaby (Berlin), Bill’s Auto (Chicago), Demo Room (Aarhus), and Dirty House (London) for which she won the Art Licks Workweek Prize. Lloyd was the Starr Fellow at the Royal Academy Schools during the 2018/19 school year and is currently studying at The University of Oxford's Ruskin School of Art and Wadham College for her DPhil in Practice-Led Fine Art with support from an All Souls-AHRC Graduate Scholarship and an Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Programme Studentship.
Lloyd creates installations that combine text, murals, and discrete objects, and writes essays that she occasionally performs. In these installations, paintings, sculptures, essays, and lectures Lloyd tries to create absurd form/content relationships. She appropriates digital, physical, and social organizational structures, commodity forms, text, and advertising imagery that she barely alters, and inserts as content her favorites, thoughts, belongings, jokes, and body. Lloyd interchanges humor, denial, and the personal to maintain a level of indeterminacy in her work that she hopes destabilizes stock relationships between looking, identifying, and understanding.
Lloyd began interviewing art workers about their livelihoods in 2017, and in 2021, Lloyd launched This Thing We Call Art, a podcast and online archive featuring 50+ excerpts from these interviews.