Pamela Earnshaw Kelly renders animals in a straightforward, objective way. Through her technique of folding and expanding the clay she is able to simultaneously capture the nature of subject and medium, enhancing both. The messages her creatures bring are thoughtful and complex. 

Kelly’s work functions as both portrait and political statement. The forms and faces she creates are charged images meant to delight and haunt the viewer. While  her sculptures evoke vulnerability and familiarity they also often carry a mark, like a wound, that brings the viewer back to the idea of animals as object, subject to the whims of man.

“For me, animals are powerful symbols,” says Kelly. "They inform parts of me unreachable by intellect—places only art and nature can touch. It is the instinctual world so easily obscured by our self conscious intellectual existence that interest me.”

Many thanks to title sponsor Robin J. Lipman.