+ By Christine Fillat
Kelly Sloskey lives in the Annapolis suburb of Cape St. Claire in a house that looks much like the others in her neighborhood but for one distinct detail—a fairy dwelling sits in her front garden. There, a rumpled, giant, green pointed hat sits atop a massive tree stump and a flagstone path leads to a charming, small, red door at the stump’s base. Children find the fairy house irresistible. One day, Sloskey noticed a small child sitting in front of the fairy house, whispering secrets to whoever was inside.
The fairy house is a subtle indication of the treasures to be found within Sloskey’s home. She is an assemblage artist. Visiting her house is like walking into the inner workings of her brain. Artworks are displayed meticulously throughout the house, placed on tables, hanging from walls, and standing on shelves. Every surface is an opportunity for a carefully crafted collection of objects, cleverly arranged. It’s all very neat and orderly. Every room is an assemblage. Every object is symbolic.
Quite often, her artworks feature a doll’s head. One of Sloskey’s first assemblages, a piece titled 24, is a small statue composed of a doll’s head, a spool of thread, decorative and utilitarian metal pieces, an odd cone hat, and a necklace with the number 24 on it. There is a solemn but capable feeling to this piece, as if the creature is just fine with her strange, metallic appendages. A friend said to her, “Kelly, that is disturbing.” “I absolutely loved that that was her description of it,” says Sloskey. Pondering the meaning of these assemblages takes time, as there are many details to her pieces. It took time and thought to put the components together, and it takes some time to decipher them.
A freestanding piece titled Potential presents a photograph of a girl who is busy with a task in the cranium of a porcelain doll head. The head is turned away from the viewer and facing a blank wall, signifying obstacles in life. A section of model train track is at the base, and a metallic butterfly is on the track. “She will reach her potential and find her dreams in spite of the obstacles that may be in her way,” explains Sloskey. “It’s intentional that you don’t see the face. You just see the little girl in there. She’ll find her path, and she’ll eventually fly.”
Mourning Glory is about grief and was completed just months after her mother passed away. When a beloved statue broke and Sloskey started gluing it back together, she found herself instead using the broken pieces and other objects to make an assemblage. The resulting piece explores the manifestations of grief. “Grief separates you a little bit,” explains Sloskey. “You’re still yourself, but you feel a little broken. You’re not doing your regular routines. You’re cut off from the world. The world is heavy, but it’s missing pieces. The only thing that’s going make you feel better is time.”
While the public areas of her home feature finished pieces, the real action happens in her workshop. Every space, nook, and cranny contains elements for some future brainstorm. Plastic bins, shelves, and drawers are labeled with their contents. A basket holds a bandolier with spent bullets. There is a stringless violin and watch parts, old games, and clown masks. An old, yellow push-button phone hangs on the wall. There are broken toys, sewing machine parts, drawers of tiny components, and jars of miniature portraits and wooden eggs. The objects are colorful. Pretty much anything one could imagine is in this menagerie of possibility. It’s a lot of stuff, but also, like the rest of her house, it is all very neat and organized. “My favorite things are free,” says Sloskey, “and there’s nothing I like better than a grandparent’s basement.”
She gathers objects for her artworks perhaps as often as every other week, and gets everything secondhand, preferring thrift shops that benefit the community. People give her objects that they think she will like, sometimes finding them on the side of the road. All objects are up for scrutiny. “Everything and anything can become a something,” she says.
Sloskey loves objects that have a story. Often, when creating a piece, the story evolves in the process of assemblage. When she made Mourning Glory, the piece initially had nothing to do with grief; that intention came about as it came together. Sometimes it is just one element that reveals what the story is.
“The story can transform, depending on who is looking at the piece,” she says. She likes to hear what people see before she tells them about her artwork. There is no wrong answer. “It comes from your own life experiences,” she says. “Someone may look at a piece and say, ‘My grandparents used to have that on their Christmas tree,’ and the piece will have meaning to them because it associates with a memory that has nothing to do with why I put it there. That’s the beauty of found objects. People still recognize those elements in the piece.”
Since high school, Sloskey has been making artwork. An art teacher was so impressed with her pieces that she created a sculpture class just for her. Making artwork was second nature for Sloskey, and she practically took that ability for granted—her mother was a painter and always had paints and canvases in the house, her great-grandfather was a graphic artist, and her cousins are artists. Sloskey would always make decorations for events that wowed her friends and then would dismantle the pieces.
Having her things out in the world is something new. In 2020, during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, she left her job at a consulting agency and suddenly had a lot of time to make things. Her sister and her husband encouraged her to enter her pieces into art exhibits. “I never looked at those things like that. I looked at them as . . . my little creatures,” she says. “Selling [a piece] is wonderful in that someone sees something in it, they want to have it, but it isn’t something I do because I’m worried about making money. If it sells, wow, someone saw something in it. I think that’s so cool.”
As time has gone by, Sloskey’s work has become more nuanced. There aren’t as many doll heads. She made a political statement with her piece O’ Say Can You See. She started that assemblage in November 2024, just after the presidential election. Featured in the juried Spring Member Show 2025 at the Maryland Federation of Art’s Circle Gallery, O’ Say Can You See is made of an antique bottle capper, a fake one-hundred-dollar bill, a mannequin hand, a vintage paperweight, and a zebra locked in a cage, among other things. Every element in the assemblage is symbolic of the current political climate.
Indicating a metal coatrack that is in the shape of a dress form, Sloskey says that she is considering using it as a base for a piece about the beauty industry and how women are judged. She has collected a giant fork and spoon, beauty products, mirrors, and measuring devices for the piece. “I’m going to do something with the scales, around the way there’s such pressure in media about [women] having to be a certain way,” she explains.
Sloskey decorates the bay window of her home. Presently, in appreciation of the 50-year anniversary of the movie Jaws, she has hung three inflatable sharks in the window. Crystals hang among the sharks, looking like air bubbles. She is living her art. ν
For more information,
visit @kellysloskeyart on Instagram.
