In Conversation
Innovating Abstract Narratives
In her pursuit of non-hierarchical feminist abstraction, Kathy pushes boundaries by merging the microscopic with the cosmic. Her project, 'Floating Chronologies,' addresses climate change by exploring our relationship with trees, urging us to rethink our consciousness toward environmental justice.
1. Your artistic practice spans various mediums, including painting, sculpture, and textiles. How do you choose which medium to use for a particular piece, and what does each medium allow you to express?
Combining mediums allows me to express much more than just using one method of making alone. I’ve always loved the idea that canvas is a textile which, when removed from the frame of stretcher bars, takes on a new life as fabric. The history of painting within the art historical canon feels very cerebral to me. Textiles contain direct haptic memory. We associate it with our clothing, with our bodies. We want to touch it! When I collage painted surfaces with textiles, when I reference tapestry and weaving alongside painting and relief sculpture, I think it activates viewers' senses in new ways. There is some kind of collective, feminist, inclusive, power at work there, which speaks to me.
2. Your pieces often feature a variety of materials, from recycled textiles to faux fur. How do you source these materials, and what significance do they hold in your artistic narrative?
I try to source most of my fabrics and yarns from recycled sources. The textile industry is a major pollutant for a variety of reasons (fast fashion, industrial dyeing, microplastics, etc.) so I seek out reuse centers. Friends and relatives often give me fabrics. I do have to buy yarn occasionally for a specific color or texture I need, but I will try to source it first. It’s important to stay flexible to what is out there. I buy canvas and paint, but I save the scraps and try to incorporate them into new projects. Alongside my reference about the cerebral/haptic interplay of painting and textiles, this method of making also fits into my climate conscious reuse mentality. I try to create as little waste as possible.
3. Your project “Floating Chronologies” addresses climate change through a reimagining of our relationship with trees. Can you elaborate on the ideas and inspirations behind this body of work?
Floating Chronologies is a body of work in conversation with climate change where material uniqueness and metaphorical language take center stage in an abstract, radically empathetic approach to reimagining our relationship with trees. I began this project by investigating dendrochronology, the study of mapping tree-rings. There is a disconnect between the science of dendrochronology, which can help us learn much about climate history, and how tree-rings are displayed in institutions. There is often an antiquated, patriarchal, or colonialist timeline pinned to the tree which also supports a “Man’s Conquest of Nature” narrative. I decided to remap these tree samples in a drawing series. I replaced their timelines with questions that are political, personal, poetic, feminist, and eco-conscious in nature. Then I created large-scale, non-narrative visual art monuments to these trees. For example, in my work, Time Traveler, viewers will not find labels like “American Discovered” pinned into spectacles of felled tree specimens. Instead, nature has its own perspective, and what might be a tree form transforms entirely into something mysterious, complex, and powerful in its own right. It becomes an energy field of swirling abstraction, a whirlpool of the eternal unconscious, suggestive of cosmic time and the shifting tectonic plates that form continents. Time becomes its own ecosystem, and we are collaborators, not controllers. Scientists use the term “floating chronology” to describe a tree-ring history whose beginning and end dates are unknown. My project transforms this concept into a metaphor for the limits of our human-centered experience and a call to action to reevaluate our relationships with the non-human world.
4. As a poet as well as an artist, how does writing inform your visual work? Are there specific themes or ideas from your poetry that you find translate particularly well into your visual art?
In 2020, I had the idea to begin a kind of “thought archive” for my work. Abstraction is its own language, and I gravitate towards it because we can approach it as a maker or as a viewer in so many different ways. Some may be drawn to the color or composition. Others to the emotional landscape it presents. Yet, in my artistic practice, so much research goes into my creative process, and some of it does get lost in translation. So, I set out to create works on paper that could help viewers understand the web of my ideas. These works included poetic statements, almost like kōans that could be interpreted in various ways, which then transformed into poetry. My father was a published haiku poet in his free time, so I grew up on poetry. In 2023, when I was in Svalbard on the Arctic Circle Residency, I had some transcendent experiences with poetry—it was like words were flying around me in the landscape and it was my job to catch them. I would be hiking on a glacial moraine while dictating poems into my phone’s notes app. Now, I am working on a visual art series titled, Svalbard Abstractions, while also writing a book of poetry about my arctic experience. The two inform each other. Both the visual art and the poems rely on deep observation of the landscape, on listening to the environment, and on the deeper connections between human and non-human consciousness in a time of climate change.
5. Looking ahead, what new themes or ideas are you excited to explore in your upcoming projects? Are there any particular challenges or goals you have in mind?
Yes! I am passionately working on my current series, Svalbard Abstractions, a series based on my first-hand experience witnessing climate change in the Arctic. In 2023, I participated in the Arctic Circle Residency, and spent three weeks living on a Tall Ship sailing the archipelago of Svalbard with artists and scientists. Experiencing the realities of climate change and mass extinction, and their impact on our world ecosystems, profoundly changed me. Svalbard Abstractions is a mixed media, collage-based painting series. Each work is an empathetic monument to the Arctic landscape, based on my observations and scientific research. Through their geometrical composition, these works contain a mystical core suggestive of deep time and interspecies consciousness. They also reference the specifics of the landscape. For example, glacial ice traps bubbles of ancient air, which is released when it melts. I was fascinated by this concept and its connection to deep-time. So, I directly reference it in my painting surfaces by meticulously blowing hi-flow paint onto some of my collage surfaces at just the drying right time. My goal and challenge is always to learn as much as possible about our relationship to the Earth, not just the historical and scientific, but also mythological and narrative legacies. I care deeply about the natural world and am committed to communicating that through art in a way that is thoughtful, deep, and true. It is my way of doing my part to fight climate change.
