* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Kelly Rene Jelinek is an artist based in Kiel, WI.
Kelly explains her work by saying, “As a someone who grew up in rural Wisconsin, I became thoroughly accustomed to seeing taxidermy deer and game mounts – I thought of them as standard items of household decor. Even when I was a small child they never scared or disgusted me – if anything, they fascinated me. That fascination stayed with me into adulthood, and has inspired the artwork that I make today. When I was a teenager, I fell in love with old upholstery and would often come home from flea markets and thrift stores with old chairs for me to experiment on. Later on, when I was in college, the two interests happened to mesh and that’s how the first of my upholstered animals were born.”
