Artist Statement
Nothing is Hidden
I have made things with my hands since I can remember. Structured craft began at eight-years-old, when my great-grandmother, who was a master of hearth and home taught me hair plaiting, weaving and knitting. Beginning with fiber I moved through through ceramics, jewelry, and photography, until I wandered into a glass studio at age 21. My fascination with the material lead to glassblowing intensives at the Corning Studio, Cleveland Institute of Art, Penland School of Craft, and later work with masters in Germany and Italy. Each material taught me something, and I approach broom making as a multidisciplinary maker rather than a specialist. In the details you can view remnants of my crafting history.
In 2021 I started making brooms to keep the grip and forearm strength that glassblowing demands. The exercise became the work. Broom making and glassblowing start with raw stock and depend on rhythm, pressure, timing, and tension to arrive at a form. With glass, the material requires decades to master and nothing is obvious. Alternatively, in a broom, nothing is hidden and the design reveals the process.
A handmade broom is a working object with a long history behind it. American broom making runs back through the Shakers to Levi Dickinson, who was tying broomcorn in western Massachusetts in the 1790s, and almost nothing about the process has needed to change since. What drew me was the economy of it: a bundle of broomcorn, a length of wood, twine, and enough tension in the winding to hold for thirty years. Nothing is hidden. A broom shows you exactly how it was made.
My brooms are built to sweep. They are also built to be looked at, displayed on a wall and considered. The tools we use to care for our homes should be worth picking up. Sweeping is repetitive and necessary, and a beautiful tool can make you notice what you are doing with intention and joy.
Living and working in Encinitas shapes what I make. Before this was a beach town it was farmland, and the poinsettia and camellia fields here were known worldwide. I am working in a place where growing things was the community's identity, and where creative ideation and movement outdoors is celebrated. My brooms are another thread in that: cultivated material, worked by hand, put back into everyday use. After years of attending Art Nights with my family, they encouraged me to build a body of work to share. I hope the brooms find new owners and start conversations about how craft celebrates the everyday work of making a house and a community into a home.
About the Creative
Meet Carrie
Carrie Kelley is a multidisciplinary maker based in Encinitas, California. She arrived at the studio by an unusual route, beginning in finance and moving through creative direction, media consulting, and brand identity work, including time as a producer and reality television personality. She stepped away from that career to raise two children, and from 2015 to 2019 she taught multimedia art as a volunteer at their elementary school, using hands-on artwork to strengthen the joy of exploration across every subject, for all types of learners.
Carrie has worked with her hands since she was eight, beginning with fiber and moving through ceramics, photography, and glass. She began work as a glass blower in 1999 and has studied at the Corning Studio, Penland School of Craft, and later in Germany and Italy. In 2021 she started making brooms to keep the grip and forearm strength that glassblowing demands,
and the exercise became the work.
"Sweeping Stories" is her first body of work in twenty years. It is inspired by the historical Encinitas landscapes community that she first visited as a High School student in 1992 and a return to the handmade craft she started with.