Come together.
Absorb the moment.

Kelsy is a Minnesota-born artist and hair stylist who works in both New York and Minneapolis. Her artistry is an exploration of spiritual and physical textures; a study of hair, Nature, and change that are understood more deeply through the prisms of photography and environment. As a veteran master stylist, Kelsy has worked privately with clients including Gwyneth Paltrow and Courtney Love, and on shoots for Vogue, å, and Elle. She spent fifteen seasons bringing her unique senses to New York Fashion week, but her ethos has been most nurtured by the Joshua Tree earth.

While studying the character changes of hair in wind, sun, and rain in the California desert, Kelsy experienced a unity between external calm and internal peace. These states of connectedness led to the development of her first major installation, Human Nature. Over the course of her career, Kelsy, a self taught artist and photographer, has used her photographs as a way of sharing the stories, patterns, and sensory experiences communicated through hair.

“How do you live in your hair?”

When I look at hair, I see expansion. It is a gateway to healing, an intimate drawbridge that connects our ever-evolving minds, bodies, and spirits. But it is also simple. At the irreducible nucleus of my understanding, lie three core elements. 

  • Each person has their own unique texture, a natural shape that is theirs alone. Individual texture is part of a greater weight exchange that, when in a state of harmony, moves. It becomes something that grows with you. My approach to technique is deeply intertwined with a question I ask myself at the start of each new session:

    ”How do you LIVE in your hair?”

  • Nature and human nature are one, unified essence. 

    Hair is continually influenced by the natural elements. Wind, water, heat—the way our hair, and by extension we as humans, interact with our environment fascinates me. 

    Desert grass moving in the California wind. Hair that stands static for a few long seconds amid the gust of a subway. These moments have changed the way that I cut hair.

  • Hair is an artistic expression. It is livable art, and it lives in different mediums for me. My work as a photographer coincided with solo-retreats, stretches of time and travel that allowed me to nurture my specialties and tap into the peace I feel when working with hair. Though I always sensed my technique was different, I often struggled with articulating the “how” and “why.” Photographing hair became a way of understanding what comes through my hands.

    It has since become a way of assisting others in their own growth, too. A way to observe that which is emerging, and to hold that which exists in the present. A journal of change.