On paper, the concept of “home” should be simple. When we’re young, we’re given this tidy idea that home is a fixed place, with a bedroom that’s all yours, midnight snacks you can find with the lights off and an innate sense of safety and security.
In reality, “home” is a lot more complicated – that tidy, almost storybook version of home is rarer than it should be. Not everyone is privileged enough to have a home to come back to, let alone one that feels safe and secure.
You can love somewhere without feeling at home. You can leave somewhere and feel more at home in a new, unfamiliar environment than you ever felt anywhere else. You can find home in people, environments and experiences, rather than a physical address.
Artist Kellsie Moore creates within that tension. On Friday, September 25, Moore’s art exhibition Becoming Home opens at Denver’s Art Gym. Open only one weekend, Becoming Home is an abstract reflection on the intangible experiences that shape us all, the memories and environments that hint toward the possibility that home isn’t always a fixed location but a feeling we must discover within ourselves.
“I love Colorado. There’s so much wonderful here. It’s beautiful; the people are cool; I love the mountains,” Moore shared. “It does not feel like home to me.”
Though Kellsie Moore spent a large chunk of her youth and early adulthood in Colorado, she’s never truly felt “at home” here. She says the same about Minnesota, where she grew up. Instead, she’s spent much of her life carrying a continuous desire to explore unfamiliar places.
That desire fueled some of her biggest life decisions: a degree in Anthropology, a cross-continental backpacking trip in her early 20s and – most recently – a three-year international expedition with her husband across Europe, the U.K., Mexico and the Middle East.
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Those experiences combined have taught Moore an invaluable lesson: our environment shapes reality. That lesson has informed her perspective over time, becoming the center of much of what she does – her daily routines, the quiet moments she spends alone and her work, whether that’s marketing or creating art.
“I have a few jobs, but I identify as an artist,” Moore said. “I take an anthropological approach to the work that I do and the art that I make. What [my anthropology] education did was help teach a critical thinking viewpoint of somebody else’s paradigm, someone else’s perspective that they’re coming to the conversation with based on their culture and lived experience in their location, environment and time. It all comes down to empathy.”
In other words, her education in anthropology helped her more critically consider how people experience the world differently. And in creating the works that make up Becoming Home, Moore is turning that critical lens toward her own worldview.
Through the use of layered textures on raw canvas and linen, the collection of original paintings that make up Moore’s Becoming Home collection highlights the tension between the physical spaces we inhabit and the intangible ways they change our understanding of the world and of ourselves. The exhibition as a whole displays that worldview, but it’s also designed to evoke empathy within viewers, to help them not just see her worldview but feel it as well.
“How did I feel when I was on the beaches of Portugal, laying on the black rock with the waves crashing against it? That’s the feeling I want to create when someone’s looking at a piece.”
Through one particular piece, “No Roots,” Moore created what she described as a “wild expression of roots not attaching to anything.” The piece is an abstract depiction of Moore’s shifting relationship with the concept of “home,” displaying, through her worldview, how it feels to be rootless.
“It’s exciting and it’s also lonely and it’s scary and it’s also so much fun,” Moore said, of the feeling. “It’s this beautifully unique, profound experience of freedom and a feeling of so much gratitude.”
While rootlessness may naturally come with discomfort, the three-year rootless travel instead left Moore with both a feeling of freedom and a better understanding of the intangible elements that can help define home.
During her travels, home, to Moore, became so much more than a fixed address. She found it in conversations she had internationally that focused so much more on passion and personality rather than productivity and profit. She found it in her relationship with her dog Leo, who she brought with her to the forests of England and the Scottish countryside.
She found it in the rainy, foggy climates that ignited creativity within her and in the quiet routines she built with her husband, in after-dinner walks and morning coffee on the porch and in the grounding balance he provides that pulls her out of the fog into the sunshine.
And, perhaps most pivotally, somewhere along the way during these travels, Moore found home within herself.
“It helped create some clarity for me individually into what I need and what I love and what lights me up and what fuels me: where I feel alive and where I feel the most at home,” Moore described. “It has really become developing this sense of home truly within myself wherever I am, regardless of location and regardless of what I’m doing.”
While creating the pieces that make up Becoming Home, Moore has found a way to access that internal sense of home by giving herself fully to the act of making.
“I have really noticed a change within myself, where, whatever work I’m doing at that moment, whatever creation I’m focused on in that moment, I really give all of myself to that, and I’m so much more committed and confident in whatever I’m doing,” Moore said. “When I paint, meditative is maybe a good word for it because it uses all the layers of yourself – the physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, all of those.”
Mirroring the change she notices within herself, Moore’s relationship with creation has similarly shifted. The two feed off of each other, a symbiotic relationship where, by fully immersing herself in her work, she can synthesize an internal safety that gives her the space for authentic creation.
The security she may have once associated with a physical home (or a lack of one) instead comes from developing greater certainty in herself.
“Home feels like safety, right? Home fuels comfort and safety and familiarity,” said Moore. “So if I can feel that within myself and whatever I’m doing, I’m going to be a lot more certain, a lot more convicted, a lot more confident in whatever it is that I’m creating.”
Through developing a sense of security within herself, Moore has given herself room to follow her curiosity and the confidence to share the pieces of herself that emerged along the way. As she prepares to show Becoming Home to the world, she’s basking in the gratitude that comes with allowing her personal reflections to open similar feelings in others.
For Moore, that exchange is part of what makes the act of creating worthwhile: the deeply human connection of sharing similar feelings despite differences in reality, perspective and environment. And it’s that connection that pushes culture forward toward a more understanding, empathetic and, just maybe, anthropological space.
“I want to use those freedoms to be able to share story and inspiration and art and passion and creativity and hopefully help light something up in someone else,” Moore shared. “Artists, we need to show up. Share your heart. Keep telling the stories because I think that’s the only way we actually really move forward.”
Ultimately, the search for home has taken Moore across continents, through unfamiliar landscapes and back into herself. Now, through Becoming Home, she gets to turn that journey into something tangible. In doing so, she’s taking up the responsibility that comes alongside artistry, one that offers others a space to look inward and, in this case, consider where and how they feel most at home.
Becoming Home is on display at Denver’s Art Gym from September 25-27, 2026, with an opening reception on Saturday September 26 from 6-8PM. More information about attending Kellsie Moore’s Becoming Home solo artist exhibition can be found here.
