Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (AIA) 2025
Kelly Cox teaches University and Community Ed art classes in Boise, Idaho. She received her MFA in Ceramics from Boise State University and her BFA from The University of Montana. She hand-builds sculptural work from clay and often collaborates on mixed media and projection-mapped installations with her partner Eric Mullis. She finds joy in the layers of emotive symbolism surrounding mundane objects and in the process of making them saggy and squishy yet still precise.
Our work is a poem of forms in space, a puzzle of symbols that ask questions with no solution, translating complex thoughts and emotions to form through touch. An idea can have more dimension when it is described from two different perspectives like how having two eyes gives us the ability to see depth.
We begin with intense observation – examining the objects we use, the built environment, flora and fauna, and media spectacle, examining both their functional and symbolic value. Sculpting our observations into objects that mediate and describe the emotions and hierarchies at play within our experiences and relationships.
We present work as a theater of recognizable parts in order to show the symbolism behind the literal, to create an absurd reason of interconnectivity that reflects the dissonance between seeing, feeling, knowing, wondering, needing and being. Our work comes from a place of love, confusion and a desire for peace in the face of persistent violence.