Kaelin palcu
anatomy of a poor decision
ON VIEW FROM: 2/25/2026 - 4/25/2026
Anatomy of a Poor Decision grew out of a period where it felt like every choice I made was wrong. For most of my life, I trusted that discipline and instinct would lead - if not conventionally - towards recognizable “success.”
Moving to New York turned that upside down. I was being humbled personally and professionally; I was putting in more work than ever and had no idea where it was going. I shed things that looked great from the outside, made work that was received differently than anything I’d done before, and chose a romantic relationship many considered morally ambiguous or more simply put, a terrible mistake.
The idea for this show solidified at a moment of transition: I left New York just as my work was gaining momentum and moved to Austin to be with my partner - into a situation that was messy and unresolved. That first weekend, my first real pause in three years, I watched my past choices and uncertain future collide. I began to dream these pieces.
My earlier work was bodily and direct, stemming from a desire to connect with my own physicality. This body of work is more ephemeral and layered - like time composting itself. These paintings pull from different fragments of time; some have dozens of buried layers that resurface and vanish again. They’re my way of understanding a new reality - where past decisions, impulses, ambitions, losses, and gains fold into one another, and I’m not entirely sure what I’m growing into.
The title isn’t about self-flagellation; it’s about how choices are judged from the outside, especially when you’re drawn to something that doesn’t align with how people would prefer you behave. In making this work, I’ve been dissecting that pull: what was deliberate, what was instinctive, and where the summation of it all will lead.
Born on Valentines Day, 1994, Kaelin Palcu is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose life has been shaped by an unrelenting curiosity and obsession for sculpting and drawing. Her practice is grounded in a deep academic rigor—what she describes as “the bones of the medium”—but it is animated by something deeply personal: the desire to understand and to learn as much as she can.
That pursuit of understanding began early. Trained as a classical pianist and jazz vocalist, Kaelin’s first apprenticeship was at sixteen with Squamish Nation carver Xwalacktun Harry, who instilled in her the potential of storytelling through material—and the ethical responsibility of doing it well. From there, she studied contemporary sculpture and design at OCAD University in Toronto before falling in love with bronze and figurative sculpture. She committed herself completely, undertaking a four-year bronze-casting and gold-smithing apprenticeship before refining her sculptural training under Robert Bodem at the Florence Academy of Art.
Her path has taken her from building monuments for Parks Canada, to teaching figurative sculpture in Barcelona, to completing her MFA at the New York Academy of Art in 2024, where she further developed a contemporary dimension of her work.