2025
Works created for exhibition CRAZE at The Painting Center.
Residing close to the sea, Skelly’s sculptural language draws from an interest and awareness of endangered surfaces found in the ocean. The sea wears and ages things in it, but these things then can become a platform for new growth. Like the cyclical life of marine animals living, thriving, and building anew onto old worn environments, Skelly’s sculptures emulate this process, combining disparate surfaces and finishes. Different shapes and tones, employing organic gestural formations. Expressing thought and emotion in her creations. Skelly uses discarded forms by repurposing older existing work in an act of collaging and assembling pieces. What may have once been a humble bowl might now be given a chance to be a larger, more complex, and varied reef-like vessel exploring color and dimension. This method has enabled her to continue the journey of her forms and their surface through creating a new outlet for parts of the former, to transform into bigger statement pieces that elaborately hold a room. In connection with her studio practice, this exhibition highlights Skelly’s desire for color and unique surfaces at The Painting Center. "CRAZE" embodies a dance of thought and emotion expressed through vibrant tones and textures of glazed surfaces. Skelly captures the essence of nature and abstraction in these maximalist compilations of crazed surfaces. Crazing can happen when a glaze is not the right fit for the clay, often this occurs when the clay does not shrink at the same rate as the glaze, leaving the glaze to peel or crawl down a pot. Crazing in ceramics can be troublesome for some, or it can be quite visually pleasing for others. For Skelly, it’s a starting point from which to explore and to use craze glazes as a tool. Skelly works to manipulate recipes to make glazes that would crawl, peel, melt, or semi-flux. In using these crazing moments in her works, she builds up surfaces and color fields.