Skins and Skeletons with Mo Kelman

5-Day Workshop with Mo Kelman

Friday-Tuesday, June 12-16, 2026, 9am – 4pm

In this experimental workshop, students will learn lashing and chaotic weaving methods for building skeletal structures with rattan and bamboo.  On these frameworks, explore methods for building skins with rice papers, pigmented and unpigmented gut, and recycled netting. Paintable graphite, acrylics, shellac and Japanese suminagashi marbleizing will further modify membrane surfaces and structures. A series of guided exercises will prompt students to invent unique, original sculptural forms. 

Skills Level: All Levels

Materials fee: $62.  This fee supplies each student shellacs, denatured alcohol, bamboo skewers, golden acrylic, Yasutomo Liquid Sumi Ink and Sumi brushes, createacolor graphite powder, Unryi Chiri sheets, Unryu-Whites sheets, flat and coiled reeds and binder cane.

Non-Members $660 / Members $650

Mo Kelman’s current work in sculpture is driven by contrasts and interactions between the built environment and the natural world, merging abstracted images of water in its various forms – rivers, lakes, clouds and ice – with industrial and architectural structures.

Kelman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and has shown her artwork in more than 100 exhibitions across the US, Europe, Japan and Korea. 

Exhibitions include Boston Sculptors Gallery, Newport Art Museum, Brown University; in NYC: Westbeth Gallery, 1155 Avenue of the Americas Gallery and Narthex Gallery; the Silk Weaving Studio, Vancouver; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the British Crafts Center; the International Shibori Symposia in Nagoya, Japan and Hong Kong; the International Textile Symposium in Kyoto, Japan; and the Cheongju International Craft Biennale and Heyri Art Factory in South Korea.  

Kelman, who lives in Providence, is a professor emeritus of art at the Community College of Rhode Island and has taught classes and workshops at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland, Snow Farm, Maiwa (Vancouver), Zijdelings (Netherlands), Fibres West (Australia), Massachusetts College of Art and RISD.  Kelman received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

Learn more about Mo at her website: https://www.mokelman.com/