MO KELMAN

I contrive forms that merge physical aspects of architecture, industry and nature. I take cues from tensile structures, where a pliable membrane is supported and shaped by cables that apply tension. Using mokume shibori, a shaped-resist fabric 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.

Current work is inspired by ephemeral phenomena—clouds, smoke, rivers and flowing water. Complex forces determine their shapes from moment to moment:  air movement, massing of water molecules, temperature change, evaporation, gravity or chemical transformation. I enjoy the irony of anchoring these dynamic forms in place, freezing a moment. 

I believe that everything we see and experience in the world is a result of physical processes.  Science is real. Nothing is purely random. Strict, underlying patterns guide the behavior and structure of everything, and those patterns allow for variation within set limits. I use this as a model in evolving my work.

For almost four decades, I’ve taught Foundations 3-D Design courses at the college level, and would ask my students to consider this—that our concepts of ideal beauty, balance, proportion and rhythm are all derived from our experiences of living in this physical world. We don’t invent these elements of good design.  We learn them through sight, smell, touch and taste. As artists, we distill, attempting to produce parallel experiences of our sense of the physical world.

My work is about structure, order and brevity.  It is my pursuit of logic: a formal logic and a poetic logic.  As I build, I also strip down.  I want to get down to just the bones.  I work with silk, cord, wire, bamboo and wood-- materials that are soft, light, flexible and open to endless development.  Color is monochromatic.  Transparency is essential.  Less is more.

I make work with my hands and simple tools. I want the nuances of building with these limited methods to enliven my sculptures in subtle ways.  These modest nuts and bolts – stitches, lashings, knots and twisted cords – repeated over and over, each unique, visible and essential.

Shadows are key in my work. The ability to conjure an image through the physics of light particles, or the absence of them, is quite remarkable. I draw a shadow on the wall behind the work, multiplying its physicality, but in a lyrical and immaterial way.

Currently, I’m winding up a sculpture I’ve been working on for more than three years.  The skeletal structure is complete; the mokume shibori skin is complete; and I’m tethering the skin to the structure, making loads of adjustments as I go.  As I fine-tune the tethers—how long they are, where they attach—the membrane becomes three-dimensional, projecting out and sinking in, transforming into an undulating plane.  I already know the title of the piece, “River in the Sky.”

Mo Kelman is a sculptor, fiber artist and professor emeritus of Art at the Community College of Rhode Island. A recipient of a U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Kelman has exhibited internationally, including the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Show; the British Crafts Centre; Korea’s Cheongju International Craft Biennale; the International Shibori Symposia in Nagoya, Japan and Hong Kong; Brown University’s Bell Gallery; and the Worcester Center for Crafts in Massachusetts. In 2012 she received an Artist’s Fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.  Kelman has taught workshops at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Maiwa, Snow Farm, North Country Studio Workshops, RISD, Fibres West (Australia), Zijdelings (Netherlands) and Kawashima Textile School (Japan).

www.mokelman.com