Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Kayla Gibbons received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2013 and BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2011. She is the 2014 recipient of the Connecticut Artist Fellowship Grant offered through the Connecticut Office of the Arts. Kayla has been an artist in residence at the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. Her work has been exhibited in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and internationally in Rome, Poland, and Turkey. Beginning in 2019, Kayla will deliver an art history seminar at the School of Visual Arts entitled Westward: Sculpture & Monumentality in the North American Landscape. Kayla currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Kayla’s practice is informed by the observation of techniques and processes employed by mechanics and machinists, the insides of body shops and classic car dealerships. Daughter of a mechanic, early curiosities around her father's work developed into an inclination to disassemble, reassemble, to examine the underside—look beneath the hood. Driven by the necessity to recount the otherwise irretrievable, her work attempts to unravel the web of memory to discover the ways that crude material can be transformed into invented form. The junkyard is utilized as a site for material reclamation where her body is the mechanism to re-enliven the closed existence of discarded parts—making sensual the industrially-produced.