Ruup & Form presents Evisceration, a solo exhibition by Christopher Kelly that translates the internal terrain of neurodivergent experience into sculptural and spatial form. The exhibition marks the fifth chapter of Kelly’s long-running project Interwoven, and signals a pivotal moment of exposure, clarity, and material resolve within the artist’s practice.
Rooted in Kelly’s lived experience of Autism and Attention Deficit Disorder, Evisceration examines the gradual loosening and shedding of masking. Kelly’s practice investigates the often unconscious restructuring of self required to navigate neurotypical environments. Through textile-based sculpture, installation, and furniture-scale works, Kelly renders these internal negotiations visible, tactile, and spatially present, inviting viewers into an embodied encounter with vulnerability, resilience, and self-revelation.
Working with crochet, macramé, weaving, and natural or repurposed materials, Kelly constructs form that oscillate between containment and release. The works open, unravel, and spill outward, holding vulnerability alongside quiet insistence. Emotional intensity is carried through material tension rather than visual excess, creating an environment that feels at once exposed and composed, intimate and assured.
Installed as a series of distinct yet interconnected zones within the gallery, the exhibition invites visitors to move through what Kelly describes as “an inner studio space”. A place where process, fragmentation, and resolution coexist. Sculptural wall works, suspended elements, a curated studio wall, and a key furniture piece titled Stability Chair together form an experience that prioritises emotional honesty and conceptual clarity.
Evisceration offers a compelling dialogue between contemporary art and spatial design, positioning Christopher Kelly’s sculptural works as resonant interventions within high end hospitality and interior environments. Through a refined textile language and an acute sensitivity to scale, tactility, and architectural rhythm, the works bring depth, calm, and emotional resonance to space without visual excess. Kelly’s approach lends itself to environments that prioritise atmosphere, wellbeing, and considered materiality. Hotels, private residences, and public interiors are invited to engage with the work as both sculptural presence and experiential anchor, where craft, narrative, and spatial intelligence converge to create environments that are quietly impactful, enduring, and human centred.
Christopher Kelly is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, craft, and design. For the past two decades, his practice has centred on handmade objects and material experimentation, exploring the possibilities of compulsive creation, sensation, and embodiment through form and substance.
Operating within the expanded field of fibre and textile sculpture, his work employs tactile knowledge and haptic memory, drawing upon the slow, meditative labour of weaving, macramé, and crochet. Executed in salvaged and elemental materials including jute twine, hemp rope, found fibres, and natural matter such as eggshells, his works articulate a sensory language that is both deeply personal and socially resonant.
Kelly’s practice is a direct communication of his neurodivergent experience, exploring how cognitive difference shapes emotional processing, perception, and identity. Using materiality to externalise and share internal states, he creates works that invite empathy and reflection.
A defining aspect of his methodology is a commitment to community engagement, woven into the conceptual fabric of his practice. Collaborations with organisations such as Central Saint Martin’s Museum, Mind UK, Autism Bucks, and the Psychological Professions Network have fostered spaces of shared authorship, where the act of making becomes an expression of solidarity, agency, and mutual recognition.
Ruup & Form is a curatorially led contemporary gallery in London, championing material led artists who work at the intersection of art, craft and design. Founded in 2019 by Varuna Kollanethu, the gallery is guided by the belief that meticulously made objects can spark cultural change, strengthen community and help us imagine more sustainable futures.
Evisceration marks a moment of clarity in Christopher Kelly’s practice. Through material intelligence and sculptural restraint, the exhibition gives form to internal states that is unseen or misunderstood. Transforming neurodivergent experience into something spatial, and tactile with quietly resolute. It’s an environment of honesty and care with vulnerability as strength and making as a language of self definition.”
Varuna Kollanethu, Founder + Director , Ruup & Form
Public programming during the run of the exhibition includes a Neuroverse Workshop on 5th February and Artist Talk: Christopher Kelly in Conversation on 5th March.
Christopher Kelly: Evisceration is at Ruup & Form, 7 Tilney Court, London EC1V 9BQ until 6th March, 2026. Find more information here.
All images Courtesy of Ruup & Form, January 2026, Evisceration, Robert Chadwick
