Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, Mo Kelman would spend weekend time with her builder father visiting houses in all the phases of being framed and finished, imagining dramas and stories in the empty, open rooms. This time spent with her father to fill as she pleased may explain the use of framework structures in her art.

Talking with Kelman in her Providence studio, she recalled sailing on the Cuyahoga on a river boat called the Good Time, collecting visual memories of steel mills, skeletal towers, lift, railroad and swing bridges. When she was 17, she witnessed the Cuyahoga River on fire. She wrote that this was, “A profound challenge to my love of both industrial landscape and the world of water in nature.”

Although the works in her upcoming exhibition at the Chazan Gallery at the Wheeler School are titled “Water Ways,” Kelman’s works are composed with the duality of industrial and water elements. There is intentional ambiguity whether the water surrounds the industrial or the industrial invades the water.

Kelman’s artistic training included a concentration in both textiles and sculpture. A refined mastery of both is undeniable in her works. She uses Shibori dyed silk or shellacked cordage as well as soaked and bent rattan to become the water component. The exquisitely lashed understructures of poplar wood, irregularly angled towers and grids, illustrate her narrative that water is subsumed by or will subsume the engineering around us.