Sabrina Weld’s latest exhibition, In The Cloud, will be presented this September at Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts, a program of Catskill Mountain Foundation. The exhibition will be held from September 12 through September 27. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 12, from 4:00-7:00 pm.
“Weathering,” by Sabrina Weld
When artist Sabrina Weld steps into the studio, she approaches clay with an instinct honed by decades of breathing life into static objects. Long before launching her current series of large-scale ceramic sculptures, Feldman cultivated a deep fascination with form, story, and movement. After graduating with a BFA in Ceramics and Sculpture from Alfred University in 1992, she spent years working in New York City’s theatrical and display worlds. There, she built giant stage puppets for touring companies, crafted walk-around costumes, and sculpted animated holiday windows for Fifth Avenue icons like Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue. In puppetry, the ultimate objective is to animate the inanimate—to turn a crafted object into a vessel for a story. When she returned to her roots in fine art ceramics after a 16-year hiatus spent raising a family and running businesses, that core objective remained unchanged. Clay, built from water and earth, naturally carries a primitive aliveness at the leather-hard stage. Through her figurative sculptures, Weld aims to reclaim that lost vitality, waking up the fired ceramic to tell quiet, deeply human stories.
Sabrina Weld
That storytelling instinct finds a striking new expression in her latest exhibition, In The Cloud. The exhibition represents a new body of work featuring large ceramic cloud head sculptures and open vessels constructed as thin-walled, hollow coil and slab paper clay forms. The surface treatments are intentionally stripped back to their simplest elements: matte white or grey clouds, soft off-white faces, and unexpectedly reflective, shiny glazes lining the interiors. By keeping the exteriors simple, Weld ensures that the sculptures react continuously to their surroundings, allowing changes in natural light to dramatically shift the mood of each piece.
Conceptually, cloud heads serve as a lens to explore the invisible architecture of human emotion and non-verbal communication. The series began as Weld processed the psychological landscape following COVID-19 lockdown observing the breakdown of face-to-face dialogue, the rise of polarizing narratives, and the way screens consumed the attention of young people. She began to visualize clouds not merely as weather in the sky, but as the private, internal weather systems every person carries. Each sculpture embodies the hidden kaleidoscope of anxieties, hopes, memories, and personal stories that shape how individuals perceive the world, what energy they project into a room, and what they unconsciously absorb from others.
Throughout the exhibition, these individual weather systems interact in ways that reflect the complexities of modern connection and isolation. In one piece, two figures share a single cloud, capturing the unseen alignment and quiet communication of a couple bound by shared values. Elsewhere, three individual cloud heads depicting children sit side-by-side yet remain completely unable to connect, evoking the quiet isolation of youth immersed in screen-mediated algorithms. Open vessel sculptures leave their interiors visible, reflecting the vulnerability of letting the outside world in, while wall-suspended pieces show human legs dangling beneath cumulus cloud forms, depicting moments when a person’s inner atmosphere completely overtakes them.
IN THE CLOUD
Ceramic Sculpture by Sabrina Weld
September 12th – 27th 2026
Opening Reception – September 12, 4-7pm
Sugar Maples Center For Creative Arts
34 Big Hollow Road, Maplecrest, NY 12454