“Motherhood is a driving force behind my work. It shook up everything in my life and made me see with different eyes. It showed me I had to dive into what makes me feel alive and true to myself. It made me a better artist.”
Kelly Carámbula is a San Francisco-based artist and sculptor. Her work explores elements of acceptance and control, often incorporating surprises that encourage the viewer to look closer, longer, or from a different perspective. She is continually interested and inspired by the tactile relationships between color and form— using clay, wood, and metal as her primary mediums.
She states: “Motherhood is a driving force behind my work. It shook up everything in my life and made me see with different eyes. It showed me I had to dive into what makes me feel alive and true to myself. It made me a better artist.”
In her current show, Moving Past, Carámbula confronts what it’s meant and felt like to live through a pandemic with two small children, one of whom has special needs. Her work is about resistance and acceptance. She has a resistance to what is expected, to the easy way, to conformity. Her work is a metaphor for her parenthood, and also is a manifested acceptance that things take time, are rarely perfect, or what we expect them to be.
Sometimes we suppress feelings and emotions just to get through difficult moments. What happens when we go back, acknowledge deep feelings, and set them free? We get to move the past out of our bodies and move beyond. And then we can see the beauty in our pain. Her work is how she processes, and we get to see the result in Moving Past.
