Karley Deets

Karley Deets (b.1999) is a current Artist in Residence at Cobb Mountain Art & Ecology Project. She was raised in the forested hills of the Berkshire Mountains where she spent her childhood navigating a swampy world filled with frogs, mud, and wonder. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics and Art History from the University of Hartford in 2023, where she discovered ceramics as a means of deepening her relationship with the natural world and those around her. Following graduation Karley was a long-term Artist in Residence at the Cub Creek Foundation, where she worked with native clays and wood fired her ceramics as to work closely with the source of her medium, the forces which enable it, and the lineage of ceramic artists before her. Her work examines and subverts relationships, dependencies, and systems of power and oppression - often through the visual language of frogs. Her work has been shown nationally in various galleries including Joseloff Gallery (Hartford, CT), Bae Campbell Gallery (Farmington, PA), Salem on Edge Gallery (Salem, OR), Ology Gallery (Thunderbolt, GA) and the Edith Wharton Estate Gallery (Lenox, MA).

Artist Statement:

In pursuit of deepened connection, understanding, and joy, I work the Earth in my hands. Clay’s infinite opportunity offers me a language to communicate with myself, forces of the Earth, fellow beings, and social structures. My Craft manifests in acts of creation, destruction, and iconoclasm. Works exist as pottery, sculpture, performance, and intersections of the three, often taking on forms of the natural world, especially frogs – small creatures I have bonded to over my lifetime living along various streams, swamps, and ponds. Ongoing series speak to issues of bodily autonomy under the United States regime, the devastation of loss, the contemporary value of earth, and personal growth in a life that has offered me great joys and even greater horrors.