BIO
Sculptor Mo Kelman is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and has shown her artwork in more than 100 exhibitions across the US, Europe, Japan and Korea.
Exhibitions include Boston Sculptors Gallery (solo) and the Boston Federal Reserve Art Gallery; Chazan Gallery (solo), Newport Art Museum, Brown University and Providence College (solo) in Rhode Island; Westbeth Gallery, 1155 Avenue of the Americas Gallery and Narthex Gallery in New York; the Silk Weaving Studio (solo) in Vancouver; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the British Crafts Center in London; the International Shibori Symposia in Nagoya, Japan and Hong Kong; the International Textile Symposium in Kyoto, Japan; and the Cheongju International Craft Biennale and Heyri Art Factory in South Korea.
Kelman, who lives in Providence, is a professor emeritus of art at the Community College of Rhode Island and has taught classes and workshops at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland, Snow Farm, Maiwa (Vancouver), Zijdelings (Netherlands), Fibres West (Australia), Massachusetts College of Art and RISD. Kelman received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.
STATEMENT
My current work in sculpture is driven by contrasts and interactions between the built environment and the natural world, merging abstracted images of water in its various forms – rivers, lakes, clouds and ice – with industrial and architectural structures.
The earth’s surface and atmosphere are three-quarters water, and just one-quarter everything else. Water is ever shapeshifting from liquid to vapor to solid. It is the most visible, dynamic and plentiful substance of the natural world. We talk and hear about it every day – too much rain; not enough rain; atmospheric rivers; coastal floods; river floods; melting glaciers.
I see water as the ideal subject to contemplate the laws that govern nature as it ceaselessly advances, trespasses and embarrasses our every effort to keep it at bay. The natural world is forever transforming, extravagant and relentless. My artwork contemplates and compares nature’s power with a built world that inevitably fails to endure.
About technique:
I am fascinated by simple building methods, lines, contours, structure and order. Transparency, lightness and shadows are essential elements for me in my search for a logic that is both formal and poetic.
Often I build tensile structures, where a pliable membrane is bridled and shaped by cables that apply tension. Using mokume shibori, a shaped-resist dyeing technique, I transform white silk organza into an elastic, translucent, woodgrain-patterned membrane. This skin is tied to structures I build with wood, bamboo and wire, and takes its sculptural form in response to stretching and tethering.
