Kelly Lloyd , things like this.

I’ve stared down enough primed canvases and black screen crashes that even the thought of it induces an immediate feeling of panic in my chest. It’s either, “Oh my god, I have so much work to do…” Or “Oh my god, what happened to all of my work?” And then, “Oh my god, if I can’t find it, I’m gonna have so much work to do…” Do I associate a blank slate, a tabula rasa, only with an unwieldy expectation or an unexpected disaster?

But as a visual experience, I find so much pleasure in emptiness. I’ve cried in front of Blinky Palermo’s triangles and will stare out across the water to the horizon for hours. I prefer it, this emptiness. Perhaps because engaging with it requires a different kind of attention and so a different kind of work.

But Palermo’s triangles and nature’s horizon aren’t empty of course, they’re blank. They’re not even blank, they’re blank adjacent. They’re relatively blank. And Palermo’s triangles and nature’s horizon aren’t without work of course. They required a lot of work on the part of a lot of people, named and unnamed, to arrive in front of us as relatively blank. But relatively blank in a valued emptiness 留白 (intentionally blank) kind of way, not in a panic-inducing tabula rasa kind of way.

In , things like this. Kelly Lloyd presents a new body of work. Lloyd creates installations that combine text, murals, and discrete objects, and writes essays that she occasionally performs. Lloyd interchanges humour, denial, and the personal to maintain a level of indeterminacy in her work that she hopes destabilizes stock relationships between looking, identifying, and understanding.

Kelly Lloyd is a Practice-Led DPhil candidate at the Ruskin School of Art and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, and Oberlin College in 2008. Lloyd has exhibited her work at, among others, the National Sculpture Factory, Cork; Royal Academy Schools, London; Institute for Contemporary Art, Baltimore; fluc, Vienna; and the Hyde Park Arts Center, Chicago. Her interviews, writing and art appear in publications including BOMB Magazine, Art Review Oxford, and The Smudge; and she has work in two upcoming publications, HAIR and WAITING (Occasional Gallery Press, 2024) and Three Days Toward the End of my DPhil (The Just Business Agency Press, 2025).