As an eco-artist (textiles), anthropologist, and activist, Kelsey Merreck Wagner (b. 1990) focuses on human-environment relationships, conservation, and plastic consumption/waste infrastructure in her research-based art practice. Since 2017, her art practice focuses solely on these topics, using recycled and found objects collected both locally and globally, and working both independently and collaboratively.

Wagner’s ongoing body of work is a series of textile wall hangings made entirely from recycled plastic bags. While her eco-art began in the United States of America, over the past 8 years she has extensively lived, traveled, worked, and completed arts-based research about environmental issues across Southeast Asia.

She has exhibited work internationally in Cambodia, Thailand, Canada, and Italy; as well as across the United States including Illinois, Texas, New York, North Carolina, and Michigan; and has done curatorial work with and for art, culture and education institutions around the world. She values community artmaking as a liminal space for advocacy and activism, and provides eco-art workshops to university and community groups alongside her exhibited work.

Her research and art practice are at the nexus of aesthetics, anthropological inquiry of environmental ruin at human hands, and hope for socio-environmental justice. She is especially interested in using art in science communication to raise awareness, initiate conversation and spark change towards coexistence among all species on the planet.