Luke-Kelly’s practice encompasses drawing, painting, and stop-motion animation, using image-making as a way to examine systems of power, collapse, and the unstable fictions that underpin human attempts at control. Operating on the narrow threshold between play and horror, her work stages scenes in which optimism curdles into catastrophe, and the promises of security, progress, and rational order reveal themselves as fragile constructions. Across these mediums, she explores the unintended consequences and surprising outcomes of bad planning and the often-comic absurdity of human ambition.

Drawing on modernist principles, Warburgian repetition, and a broad art historical vocabulary, Luke-Kelly constructs visual worlds where narrative, cultural inheritance, and symbolic meaning are constantly in flux. Her works are populated by figures that shift from classical to cartoonish, and by animals that mutate into one another or adopt animatronic form, collapsing distinctions between the familiar and the uncanny. These unstable entities suggest a reality in which ontology itself is unsettled: identities slip, hierarchies dissolve, and the boundaries between categories refuse to hold.

Central to the practice is an interest in what emerges when systems fail — when strategy unravels, control falters, and the hidden absurdities of social and political structures come into view. The works often inhabit moments of suspended consequence, where collapse is imminent but not yet complete, and where humour and dread coexist in uneasy balance. In this space, power appears not as fixed authority but as something theatrical, contingent, and perpetually at risk of undoing itself.

This instability is echoed materially in the work. Paint shifts between tightly controlled rendering and loose, gestural passages; surfaces move through impasto, chalky dryness, and liquid satin finishes. Colours transition from soft restful pastels to lurid hues. Nothing remains stylistically or materially fixed. The biological and the mechanical merge seamlessly, as bodies, objects, and environments fold into one another. Through this continual transformation, Luke-Kelly’s work proposes a world in which safety is always provisional, and the logic of power — along with its trajectory — remains fundamentally uncertain.

Cait Luke-Kelly (b. 1983, Wegberg) is currently in the final year of an MFA at Slade School of Fine Art. She has a BA in History and History of Art from The University of Edinburgh and studied for a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London.