Folks looking to buy arts and crafts items from vendors at local farmers markets and art shows usually find things made using mediums like paint, wood, glass, fabric and more.
But an Aurora artist who operates a one-woman business in the city likes getting her hands dirty with concrete.
“I started as an online home decor shop, and I had sourced these concrete planters and just loved them and decided to figure it out for myself,” said Chelsie Kliese, 34, who launched her own business, House of Ivy. “I went and bought a bag of concrete and mixed it up myself and started playing around with it.”
Kliese said she started doing crafts about four years ago and launched her website back in January of 2021. Before that, she earned a degree in business and marketing and “worked the first few years in corporate marketing” but soon found out she “preferred a structured process and I ended up transitioning to a career in construction.”
“It was just administrative work with a commercial and residential company, McShane Construction in Rosemont, where I worked almost six years,” she said. “I’ve always been into art and making things with my hands and with the COVID shutdown I was sent home to work remotely and it was in that summer of 2020 that my stepdad kind of convinced me finally to make a business out of my handmade pieces.”
Kliese continued to work remotely while also moonlighting in the craft world. Her craft items at that time weren’t made of concrete but rather out of “old reclaimed wood.”
“The first handmade thing I ever sold was a hand-painted wood sign. I would take old reclaimed wood that would have ended up in a landfill, and I would put it together using my biscuit joiner and put boards together to make a sign and hand paint it,” she said. “I started selling those and my stepfather said to keep going.”
The lure of not having to commute to Rosemont and “wearing whatever clothes I wanted to wear and not what corporate or the business world says I have to wear” made Kliese realize she was much happier working from home.
She spent the next seven months “doing all the backend work” including ordering inventory and setting up a website and opened a home decor shop “that was sourced from other people and reselling things on my site as a curated collection.”
“I had sourced these concrete planters that I loved and it was the first time I ever touched concrete. I’d never seen it in this capacity and I went and bought a bag of concrete,” she said. “I mixed it up to see if I actually liked the act of mixing and pouring and I loved it. It took a few months to dig in and figure it out myself and now I don’t make anything except things with my handmade concrete.”
Objects are made inside silicone molds with powdered pigments added which create color that Kliese says “run through the whole piece, not just a topical application.”
The most challenging part of working in the medium is temperature.
“For an art girl – I sure picked science for a hobby because there is so much – temperature is the biggest challenge because the temperature of the air matters,” she said. “The temperature of the air dictates the temperature of what your water needs to be. In general, if the air is hot, I’m using cold water to counteract the curing time and vice-versa. There are temperature ranges I have to abide by.”
Kliese says she also battles “people’s perception of the product,” with some wrongly assuming “because it’s concrete it won’t break.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I hear people saying, ‘It’s concrete and it won’t break,’ and actually the pieces can be more fragile,” she said.
Kliese estimates having made at least 10,000 pieces using concrete over four years.
Sarah Dowd of Crystal Lake said she has bought over 20 pieces of Kliese’s work over the past five years and “has seen concrete become pretty at work” with the construction company where she is employed “but never seen it as home decor pretty.”
“That was something that threw me for a loop because everyone assumes it’s ceramic,” she said. “One of my two favorite pieces is an oyster tray. It’s really versatile at home. I use it for my candles and things like that and I have an oval tray on top of that too. I have it in each of my bathrooms holding soap. I think there is always something different. She’s always imagining something new.”
Mary Michaelsen of Brookfield said she also owns more than 20 pieces from the Aurora artist and that “everything she makes she does things so meticulously.”
“You just feel like the art is kind of magical, if that makes sense. To know that she makes everything by hand, how does somebody do that?” Michaelsen said. “I don’t come from an art background at all. I’m not good at it, and to see how some artists can just take something so functional as concrete and turn it into something so beautiful is really impressive.
“When people learn this isn’t pottery, they can’t believe it,” she said. “As soon as they touch it, they’re instantly hooked. Every piece kind of tells its own story.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
