For artist Kelsey Cruz-Martin, the 2025 Freelands Studio Fellowship at Cardiff Met unfolds an unexpected yet welcome experimentation into new forms of artistic practice, from performance to metal casting. Working in the foundry (a growingly rare space in art schools, used for casting metal), she explores the alchemy of transformation. Thought its provisions and ethos, the university encourages a living laboratory of exchange where students, technicians, and chance encounters invite material exploration. Within the institutional rhythm, Kelsey occupies a liminal space: not student, not tutor, but something fluid – shifting between making, learning, and guiding.
Her time at Cardiff has opened a performative current in her practice with writing and sound folding into sculpture, and performance slipping into equal parts research and community building. The Fellowship’s structure, with its dedicated access to time, tools, and a local DIY art scene, has nurtured a site of risk and renewal, which Kelsey interrogates and recycles back into her material practice.
Here, experimentation replaces certainty, and collaboration with students and local artist-led spaces ignites a shared choreography of making and unmaking. Enabling an environment for artistic practice that invites slowness, vulnerability, and the courage to melt things down – to begin again, and again.