Our monthly Artist Window series celebrates the creativity and individuality of the artists who make up the Brick & Mortar community. Each month, one of our members transforms our front window into a miniature exhibition, sharing their work, inspirations, and unique artistic perspective.
This month, we're excited to feature Kelly McCullough, a lifelong artist and creative whose wild, colorful, and intentionally imperfect ceramics are as much about personal expression as they are about the objects themselves.
Art & altars
Kelly creates what she calls "altar pieces": hand-built ceramic objects that serve as both art and personal spaces for memory, ritual, and meaning. Many of her pieces are functional, designed to be flipped and used in different ways: as vessels for flowers, incense holders, or places to display crystals, rocks, and other treasured objects.
The inspiration comes naturally. Kelly describes her home as something of a curiosity shop, filled with artifacts, memorabilia, travel treasures, books, minerals, tarot cards, shells, and, of course, ceramics.
Over time, her altar pieces have evolved into increasingly expressive forms, with exaggerated proportions, unexpected pockets, and playful tensions between shape and function.
Finding her way to clay
Although Kelly has been creative her entire life, ceramics entered the picture only about ten years ago. Growing up surrounded by artistic family members (including two talented grandmothers, a mother who loved sewing, and a father with a gift for humorous poetry and cartoons!) she eventually pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Communication Design and built a successful career in advertising and branding.
But despite all that creative experience, she had barely touched clay until she walked past Clay by the Bay in San Francisco and decided to sign up for a class with a friend.
What began as a new creative outlet quickly became something much bigger: a place to slow down, be present, connect with others, and find a sense of belonging.
Kelly credits the teachers and fellow artists she's met along the way with shaping her practice. Early experiences with Shelley Simon's Alter and Add class and a workshop with Didem Mert helped cement her love of handbuilding over traditional wheel throwing. More recently, a workshop with Giselle Hicks in Jamaica introduced her to a coil-building technique that opened up new possibilities for exploring organic forms.
And perhaps most importantly, ceramics brought her into a community of friends and makers, many of whom are now part of Brick & Mortar Studios.
Color, texture, and happy imperfections
Kelly's process is intuitive, gestural, and experimental. Working with pinched pots, organic slabs, and what she affectionately calls "snakey coils," she builds forms with surface design already in mind.
Texture and color are central to her work. She gravitates toward speckled clay bodies, carved patterns, and layered glazes that react and interact in unpredictable ways. Her palette is unapologetically bold: neon green, chartreuse, pear, jewel tones, and dramatic contrasts of black and white.
She combines hand-painted underglaze patterns, drippy oxides, reactive dip glazes, and vivid brush-on colors to create richly varied surfaces. It's a meticulous, often time-consuming process, but as a self-described maximalist, Kelly finds the results deeply satisfying.
Just as important as the color is her rejection of perfection.
While she appreciates the technical skill behind beautifully centered pottery and smooth, symmetrical forms, her own work deliberately moves in another direction. She embraces asymmetry, impressions, unexpected alterations, and the marks left by the making process.
As Kelly puts it: "I am the client, and what I like and love to make is organic, breaks so-called rules and seeks no approval."
Making space for emotion
For Kelly, ceramics are an outlet for exploration, healing, and processing emotions… a tactile expression of her inner world, past, present, and future.
Working with clay gives her permission to slow down, work intuitively, and explore without needing to know the answers in advance. It's a way of transferring emotion into something tangible, beautiful, and intentional.
She hopes that connection carries through to those who encounter her work. Beyond the bold colors and expressive forms, she wants viewers to notice the details, look inside the pieces, and feel the love that went into making them.
In her words, it's about the "mystical and magical color choreography" and the sacred spaces these objects can hold.
We invite you to stop by Brick & Mortar Studios to experience Kelly's Artist Window, on display through the end of October. Take a closer look at the vibrant colors, rich textures, and unexpected details… and discover the love, emotion, and creative freedom behind each piece.
Explore more of Kelly's work on Instagram: @fang.city
For inquiries about her work, reach out to Kelly via Instagram DM.
