Andréa Keys Connell: Pattern Mapping
June 28 - November 29, 2025 | Rankin West Gallery
To read more about this exhibition and Andréa’s work, visit the curatorial essay written by BRAHM’s Curator of Exhibitions & Collections, Ian Gabriel Wilson, linked below.
At the heart of Andréa Keys Connell’s work is a question: how can the things we make help us hold time, memory, and care? Her ceramic sculptures—often fragmented, patterned, and emotionally charged—explore what it means to endure, to remember, and to repair.
Connell’s figures do not always appear whole. Limbs are stretched or stilled, faces are hidden, and bodies lean forward into uncertain space. Yet each one carries a quiet sense of presence—something tender, unresolved, and deeply human. They feel at once familiar and strange, comforting and unsettling.
In this exhibition, Connell draws from personal and family history to explore pattern as a way of holding memory. Floral motifs and layered surfaces reference textiles, heirlooms, and rituals of making. For her, patterns are more than decoration—they are markers of time, traces of care passed from one person to another.
The gallery becomes a kind of landscape shaped by loss and resilience. The work is informed by motherhood, by objects lost in a fire, and by the ones that survived. These sculptures don’t offer answers. Instead, they invite quiet reflection: What remains after something breaks? What do we carry forward? How do we hold what’s left?
Connell is an artist and educator based in Boone, North Carolina, where she serves as Associate Professor and Program Coordinator for Clay in the Studio Art program at Appalachian State University.