Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident- October 2024, Long-Term Resident 2025-2026
Kelly McLaughlin grew up in Washington State where she received her BFA from Pacific Lutheran University in 2014. She completed a Post Baccalaureate program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage in 2017 and received her MFA in Ceramics from Ohio University in 2020. After graduate school, McLaughlin was a summer resident at the Archie Bray Foundation, a long-term resident at Studio 740 from 2020-2023, and a returning fall resident at the Bray in 2022. She is moving to Red Lodge from Helena, MT, where she was a resident at Omerta Arts from 2024-2025. Her work has been showcased throughout the US and can be found in numerous private and public collections.
My work is an attempt to understand spaces of indecision and struggle: pivotal moments of kinetic force that change the events to follow. I use realism and life-size scale in animal and human forms to juxtapose elements together, in effect, freezing time. Capturing these moments allow me to analyze, move through, and explore their place within a larger story. Though agnostic myself, my work refers to my religious upbringing and academic studies of religion, psychology, and anthropology; often referencing mythology and archetypes as a visual access point. I’m currently investigating what movement looks like in a stagnant image and how to visually define a state of flux using ceramic sculpture.