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“For quite a long time I made paintings that were 80 inches squared and 80 inches is exactly the height of me and my vertical reach. I’ve never measured the cardboard that break-dancers put down, but it is like a perfect stage made for one person and one person’s reach on the ground. I think of my paintings like that: a stage built just for me. When you start going up and down on ladders things change, it’s a different process… Often I think of my paintings in terms of theater sets—a fake world surrounded by a larger atmospheric light world—you only glimpse the stage through this light construction that permeates and creates the physical space. Then, of course you have actors that are so tiny compared to this larger space. The stage is also strangely much more shallow than the space around it. I like the feeling of looking through things to a world you can’t quite access, or a residue of a former world that you can’t quite get to, and I try to have that in my paintings.”
- Keltie Ferris, in conversation with J. Earnest, Brooklyn Rail, 2 April 2014