Featured Artist: Kelley Knickerbocker

I’m a Seattle native and studio artist/instructor, with a background that’s more exploratory and self-taught than formally artistic. After 25 years in admin at the University of Washington, in 2005 I brought art/craft from a side hustle to a full-time vocation and never looked back. My material-driven practice centers around experimentation, innovation, and conceptual expression.

I first stumbled on Apoxie Sculpt in 2018 when looking for a quick-hardening clay-like medium with which to form thin sinuous lines of color that could curve interestingly through the angularity of mosaic. Apoxie Sculpt was easy to form and hardened overnight won my heart immediately, but what really thrilled me was that it could be colored with oil paint, so there were no color limitations. I quickly figured out that white, natural, and black Apoxie Sculpt were all I needed to have on hand to produce endless gradients and nuanced hues in any color.

It’s been a blast discovering how Apoxie Sculpt can become an element of mosaic, from wrapping the edges of individual tesserae (pieces) with a thin layer of color before joining them together into a mosaic to wrapping the edges of an entire mosaic (which has pretty much replaced framing for me at this point!) to creating a gilded edge filigree to becoming a velvety field of dots when formed into ‘sticks’ then broken into small lengths set tightly together on end.

I don’t expect I’ll get to the end of the Apoxie Sculpt possibilities for mosaic anytime soon, and I’ll have a blast experimenting all along the way! If you’d like to learn more about how I use Apoxie Sculpt in mosaic, head over to mosaicartsonline.com and check out my course on that very thing (and my 13 other online courses on other aspects of mosaic style and technique).

I’m a process junkie and regularly share work-in-process photos on Facebook and Instagram, so find me there and make some discoveries along with me. I also teach in Seattle and elsewhere on a regular basis, and info on all my upcoming courses can be found on the workshop page of my website.

Website: rivenworks.com
FB: Facebook.com/RivenworksMosaic
Instagram: @k2makes

Kelley Knickerbocker has a course titled “Beyond Adhesive: Apoxie Sculpt as Mosaic Material.” Here is a link to check out the FREE promotional video.

Try out these related products: Aves Finishing Solution, Aves Apoxie Paste, and Aves Apoxie Sculpt.