Karina Mott

The house I grew up in didn't have room for art as a real thing a person might do. So I kept it to myself, and I got very good at a different kind of problem-solving. I spent years as a research engineer at IBM — rigorous, technical work that I was genuinely good at and that taught me patience, iteration, and how to stay with a hard problem long past the point it stops being fun.

It turns out that's most of what making art requires, too.

At some point I decided to give the art an honest try — not as a hobby squeezed into evenings, but fully. That's the part I want people to hear. Not that it worked out, but that the decision was available the whole time.

I don't want my work to live only in collections. I want it on a wall in a rented apartment, on a table where people eat, around somebody's neck at a grocery store. So I built NERI Gallery as an artist collective with a real range of price points — entry-level wearables and small objects alongside larger paintings and kiln-formed glass.

It's a collective on purpose. Origami, lapidary, glass, resin, ceramics — other makers show there too, because art is more interesting when it brings people into the same room.