‘Keep making the work’

Moorestown artist Kathleen “Kt” Carney has a sculpture on her property that pays tribute to a man she never met.

After reading an obituary about Ommie, who liked fast cars and motorcycles, Carney was inspired to make a sculpture in his honor. One day she was running an errand when a man pulled up next to her on his motorcycle. She sketched the bike right in her car.

“I did not know this man Ommie,” Carney recalled. “I just made a sculpture to commemorate the obituary that was written about him that was so succinct.”

After graduating from Pemberton High School, Carney attended the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia for two years, then earned an elementary-education certification degree from then-Glassboro State College. She taught in the public schools for 32 years, 10 of them as a middle-school English teacher, and she also taught at a juvenile detention center for two years.

Carney would show her students her drawings and sculptures and they would ask her why she wasn’t teaching art. That contributed to her spending the next 21 years teaching art after she received her certification.

“ … If you make a sculpture and it falls apart structurally – it just doesn’t hold together in the manner you intended – then it’s failing as far as being a success,” Carney explained. “But these are things that you can learn and experiment with and have fun with.”

Carney lived in Philadelphia, Riverton, Maple Shade and Palmyra before settling in Moorestown. She’s attended classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where she met artists from whom she could springboard ideas. While there, she was a shop monitor for a metals class taught by sculptor and lecturer Steven Nocella.

Carney started working with stone carving before having daughter Caroline, but before she put her art on the back burner, she peeked inside PAFA’s metal shop. That brought back memories of her working with metals, and it inspired her to work more with that medium.

Carney is also a weaver and a painter. She likes welding because she has hard, immovable products. They can resist, so she has to have an idea of how to move them. But for Carney, it’s a fine balance.

For years, she was a member of High Wire Gallery in Philadelphia, where she participated in member shows. In 2016, she graduated from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia with a master’s in art education, with an emphasis in special needs. Earlier this year, she made a troll for Burlington County’s Troll Trek, an outdoor exhibit that features troll sculptures created from recycled and natural materials.

Carney’s troll, Nels, was made from recycled bicycle parts that sat in her driveway for years and was recently re-located to Amico Island Park in Delran.

Carney grew up on a lake in the Pine Barrens with her three sisters and two brothers. She remembers making a snowman sculpture out of leftover concrete from a construction site down the street, followed by an angel ornament that she carved in the fifth grade. Carney doesn’t own either anymore, but she’s always thought of making sculptures as a great way to fill the air.

When Carney looks at everything in her collection, she thinks of it as 98% good stuff with which to make art and 2% that should be thrown away.

“Most people would throw half of that stuff in the garbage,” she related, “but I grew up in a time when conservation was really important … We’re caretakers and we can’t just be consumerists and say, ‘Just throw it in the trash,’ and not think of it ever again.”

Carney likes to make art with recycled materials, giving them a new life. Sometimes it’s a home run and sometimes she’s still working it out. When she views other people’s work, she looks at the craftsmanship and the intention of the materials, not something that’s just thrown together but something made with thought.

“You can see the thought process and that somebody has maybe stumbled onto something that they could make 40 different sculptures,” she noted, “thinking about the material and the same structures and yet have variations on them … That’s interesting to me.”

When she does something once, very rarely will Carney want to do the same thing even if it was successful. She’ll see something that she can do that’s maybe a little bit different. She might see similarities in her work, but hopefully something new is added.

Daughter Caroline is also an artist, and earlier this year, she displayed her collaborative art installation, “Block by Block,” at The Study at University City in Philadelphia. When she was younger, Carney always championed her daughter’s passion.

“I’m very, very proud of her,” she elaborated. “ … She’s very smart and intuitive and she has creative ideas, and she’s really, really good at detail-oriented kinds of stuff. She is a champion of mine (also), so I’ve always liked that about our relationship.”

Carney advised fellow artists to keep making their work even if they don’t know what they’re trying to say, and not to be afraid to take a break and come back.

“Never walk away from your work,” she observed, “without knowing what you’re going to do when you come back to it.”

For more information on Carney, visit www.ktcarney.com/index.html.