Keziah : A Year of Voice, Risk, and Transformation
Keziah’s year as TKE Studios Performance Artist Fellow has been marked by experimentation, introspection, and a steady expansion of her artistic language.
Coming into the fellowship from a background in music and hairdressing, Keziah used the residency to rethink how performance could operate within a visual arts context. Central to her experience was the simple but rare combination of time, space, and permission to explore. Having a studio of her own allowed her to develop ideas slowly, test new forms, and follow unexpected directions.
Over the course of the year, her work grew to encompass immersive performance, sound, film, and sculptural elements. She became increasingly interested in ceremony, ritual, and the body as a site where identity and power are negotiated. Hairdressing, a trade she knows intimately, became a conceptual anchor in her first fellowship performance, Deeper Cut. The work considered the salon as a space of care, confession, and transformation, foregrounding the emotional labour and relational intimacy embedded in everyday acts of grooming and self-presentation.
Alongside live work, Keziah began exploring moving image as a way for performance to exist beyond the moment of its staging. Live projections developed into a deeper engagement with film, including new works shot on location in Margate. This shift reflects an ongoing question in her work: how performance can leave a trace, or hold presence, without requiring the artist’s body to be physically present each time.
Her fellowship culminated in The Great Drama, an immersive performance combining voice, sound, movement, and sculptural installation. Drawing on the historical case of Elizabeth Packard, a woman institutionalised by her husband in the 19th century for defying his authority, the work wove together historical research and personal experience. It asked what it costs to claim one’s voice within systems that reward compliance and punish resistance. Built through repetition and trance-like sonic structures, the piece prioritised emotional atmosphere over linear storytelling, holding audiences in a shared and often intense space of reflection.
In addition to her own projects, Keziah contributed to the wider studio community by leading workshops with TEARS artists, sharing her interest in sound immersion and somatic approaches to engaging with art. These sessions extended her focus on art as an embodied and collective experience.
As her fellowship ends, Keziah has a clearer sense of herself as a multidisciplinary artist, with a practice that now moves fluidly among music, performance, film, and installation. Her recent work suggests a continued interest in building immersive environments that centre vulnerability, agency, and transformation.
We thank Keziah for her energy, openness, and commitment during her residency, and we look forward to seeing how her art develops in the years ahead at TKE Studios, where she retains her studio space.
