Artist Spotlight: January, 2026
Mo Kelman
Tell us a little about your background.
I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, a city that blossomed in the late 1800s with railroads, steel, and oil industries. When I was a kid, my dad, who was a builder, brought me to his work sites on weekends, where I freely roamed through wood-framed structures, enchanted by the patterns of lines, and simply defined spaces that could become any sort of room I imagined. My Romanian grandmother, who decoratively trimmed every towel, sheet, pillowcase, and dishtowel in the house, had me crocheting by the age of five. A few decades and a couple of academic degrees later, I found myself at the Community College of Rhode Island, where I taught foundations, sculpture, and textile design for 36 years. While I always maintained my own studio practice, I put just as much time and energy into teaching.
When did you know you were an artist?
I went to Monmouth College in Illinois for my undergrad degree, initially declaring a major in Psychology. After taking a couple of art courses to fulfill distribution requirements, my art professor encouraged me to switch majors. This made sense to me, and with a minimal amount of soul-searching, I followed through. Trajectory established, and here I am.
Was there a pivotal moment for you?
I grew up in the glory days of Cleveland’s steel mills and factories. They lined the banks of the Cuyahoga River as it twisted through The Flats and gushed into Lake Erie. I loved the landscape of skeleton towers and massive steel bridges—railroad bridges, lift bridges, swing bridges, jackknife bridges—and strings of monster power poles, shrinking toward the vanishing point. These structures revealed everything about their engineering. The functions of supporting weight, distributing and deflecting force, and partnering with gravity were all right there, in front of my eyes. I was a “form follows function” fan before I’d ever heard those words.
Though this river landscape provided an ideal landscape of structure, order, and function, it did not come without pitfalls. I turned 17 in the summer of 1969 when the oil-slicked Cuyahoga caught fire.
Where do you find inspiration?
For inspiration I look at architecture and built structures that lay bare their engineering, physical rhythms, and responses to the force of gravity. Frei Otto, a postwar architect who pioneered lightweight tensile sructures, has been a profound influence on my work. I’ve adapted his principles of tension structures in my series of “skin and skeleton” sculptures.
The architecture of the biological world also guides my work, providing models of form, proportion, pattern, and function.
Lately I’ve been drawn to pure geometry, circles and spheres in particular. This has required much more of a background in geometry than I have. I hack my way through the design problems in a hands-on manner, making models and loads of drawings with a compass and T-square, grappling with how to build the form in space.
My current body of work 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. This has involved research into the physical behaviors of water: from atmospheric rivers to swallow holes, which swiftly drain lakes into the ground below.
What is your favorite medium?
My sculptures are “skin and skeleton” structures. I favor simple malleable materials, like wood, rattan, bamboo and cordage. They can all be manipulated and shaped in an infinite number of ways. A particular attribute of rattan, and many other natural materials, is that you can shape them while wet, clamp until dry, and the memory for that form becomes permanent.
Often I build tensile structures, where a pliable skin is bridled 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. Alternatively, I fabricate nets through knotting and interlacing methods. When I tether these shibori or netted skins to my built structures they take their sculptural form in response to stretching in tension.
Can you describe your process?
Rough sketches, often drawn on napkins or the white margins of magazine pages, start the process. A series of drawings follows to progressively poke, prod, and finesse the form and fabrication method. Construction renderings are drawn to the scale of the final form. T-squares, rulers, and compasses get involved. Because I desire a connection to my hands in every step of the process, I don’t employ digital tools.
Although I have no formal training in engineering, nothing makes me happier than coming up with a solution for holding parts together and making something stand up against the forces of gravity. Most often, I connect linear materials, like wood, rattan and wire, with the simple method of lashing—wrapping and knotting overlapping parts with extra-strong cordage or wire. A sculpture may require as many as a thousand lashings.
Skins of mokume silk or interlaced nets are fabricated through a series of lengthy processes, and integrated with the completed structures. 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.
Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your work?
The central actor in my current sculpture series is water. 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 adaptable substance of the natural world. Daily we talk about 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 current artwork contemplates and compares nature’s wondrous power with a built world that inevitably fails to endure.
Read about other artists on the Meet the Artists page.
Mo Kelman
Mo Kelman, Water Spirit, 2024
Wood, rattan, waxed linen cord, pigment
17” x 44” x 20”
Photo credit: Karen Philippi
Mo Kelman, On Thin Ice, 2024
Wood, bamboo, cordage, shellac, pigment
16” x 17” x 17”
Photo credit: Karen Philippi
