Celeste Keller is a Toronto based artist best known for her ethereal underwater self portraits. Her work explores identity, stillness and the quiet threshold between control and surrender.

Each painting begins with an immersive self photograph, taken while submerged, alone, breath held and camera rolling. What the lens captures is not a staged moment, but a raw encounter with distortion, weightlessness and emotional presence. These fleeting images are then transformed, layer by layer, into oil paintings.

Her process is both physical and introspective. Working slowly over several weeks, she creates visual meditations that invite the viewer to pause and reflect. Water becomes a metaphor for memory, fluidity, vulnerability and transformation.

Her work has been collected across North America and continues to evolve as a deeply personal investigation of the self beneath the surface.