Artist Statement| kateyberry

Landscapes/Mindscapes (2020 - present)

I walk every day in the rural countryside of the Pecos Valley in New Mexico. My paths take me deep into a valley along a river's edge and up to great heights on rocky cliffs surrounded by miles of outstretched wildland. Moving through this landscape, I experience the intimate and vast spaces that inspire and feed my work.

My paintings are 'built' on panels in two phases. First, I map out the piece by painting color fields and drawing charcoal lines. The colors and lines define the mood, and place and delineate space. Next, the painting's outermost skin and resonant voice are achieved by a process I developed using beeswax and thread.

The threads are untwined from a four-part twine into single strands, and then they are dyed in baths I concoct using what I consume or live around (i.e. spices, foods, coffee, wine, plants, grasses, etc.).

The time-consuming repetitive act of untwining hundreds of feet of thread for each painting puts me into a meditative state. To achieve a clean quick untwining my mind and hands must find a consistent rhythmic movement that focuses both.

Concocting nature-derived dye baths for my thread to soak in is alchemic, never fully predictable, and reminiscent of how prehistoric peoples made Art tens of thousands of years ago by transforming natural materials into artistic mediums.

The untwining and dye processes were purposefully developed to create a focused state of mind, a physical intimacy with my materials, and a connection to the beginnings of human art-making.

I brush melted raw beeswax over my prepared painted surface. Now it is time to lay in my thread. As I press each thread deeply into the wax they reveal their unique form. The threads contract, expand, and sometimes break, intermittently and beautifully. Some threads are relatively thick, some thin, some frayed some tight, I love not knowing what they will do or be until I push them fully into the wax. Each additional thread's placement is determined by the desired relationship to the previous thread laid down, in this sense, as often in life, the past forms the future. The material, not me, finds its final form, and ultimately 'becomes'. After all the threads are deeply embedded I finish the piece by using small hand-made tools to slowly burnish each thread embedded in the wax and all the spaces between them to a hard shine allowing light to dance on its surface.

My visual language of colors, rhythmic lines, and textured sensual surfaces is born from a meditative mind and an intimacy with material to translate the lingering essence of satiating places into a painting.

On past work:

Cocoons (2019)

I made cocoons from one continuous wax-coated thread. These cocoons are meant to hold, conjure, and embody the idea of Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis = a change of the form or nature of a thing or person into a completely different one, by nature or supernatural means. Metamorphosis is the epitome of powerful life change. I made these cocoons for a year and the making of them eventually led to the paintings I started to make in 2020 and still make now.

Cubes (2014 - 2019)

I made 6" empty wood Cubes that I filled with hand-made ceramic objects, mirrors, and photographs with a single glass-enclosed viewing portal. These cubes held spaces that only the eye and mind could access and that only one person at a time could view, reinforcing the intimacy and non-physicality of seeing. Inside the cube, on its interior walls, I surrounded my ceramic objects with mirrors and photographs I took of them outside the box to address how we see: there is the immediate seeing of the object itself, the seeing through reflection in mirror image, and seeing the object in the past in photographs. This work was my way of addressing and clarifying the many ways we see and hold objects in our mind's eye.

Collaborations with insects, time, and weather (2011 - 2013)

While walking in the New Mexican mountains, deserts, and river beds

I collect decaying pieces of wood.
I am struck by how they have been dramatically re-shaped by insects, time

and weather.

Their bodies reveal their histories.

Collaboration begins when I thoroughly gut each piece of its soft rot and reveal

the hard form; its core.

This is a process of discovery because I cannot predict what will be uncovered.

I then scrape, sand, and smooth each piece and surround them in earth-based mediums: clay, wax, and metal leaf.

The process feels deeply ceremonial and ritualistic...

from the selecting...to the gutting...to the surface working...to the re-dressing...

to the mounting on the wall or placement on a pedestal...

subject and I go through a transformation.

Portraits of the Microscopic (2006 - 2013)

Fascinated with what the naked eye cannot see I did portraits of microscopic and astronomic systems using gold leaf and plaster. Overlaying gold leaf on top of the plaster and carving out the images felt very intimate and precise as the subject matter seemed to ask of me. Gold leaf lending its transcendent, light-reflecting, quality to these subjects allowed these life systems to glow.