Artist Profile: Kate Kinder
Growing up in the lush forests of South Central Kentucky rewarded me with a lifetime love of nature and slow-made things. With parents who went to school for art and siblings inundated with their own artistic interests, my childhood was filled with music, color, and theater. Upon reflection, it is obvious how I fell in love with making things at such an early age.
Starting from painting rocks and coloring refrigerator boxes, my enthusiasm for art-making flourished into creating things like double-sided hand-printed and painted wallpaper-like tapestries, palm-sized oil paintings, and everything in between.
As a fourth grader, I dressed up in my mother’s beret and a painting smock holding a palette for career day. So, in some ways, I’d say I’ve always known I wanted to be an artist. Even though at the time I didn’t realize that “career” and “passion” could even be the same thing, I was going to force my will until it happened.
As a teenager, I clumsily meandered through general education courses and was always eager to get back to the art room. In college, I attempted becoming a graphic designer, but I quickly failed because I spent too much time in the painting studio.
After much-needed encouragement and mentorship from my professors at Western Kentucky University, I moved to Tampa, Florida in 2014 to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of South Florida.
Fast-forward to over a decade later, and I’m a practicing artist and college professor helping my students realize that, whether you’re a fourth grader or 97, once you’re bitten by the art bug – it’ll never let go.
The neon lights, beaches, and packed places of Florida began inhabiting the subject matter of my work almost immediately after arriving. As a person who grew up in a town of only 6,000, I was effectively culture shocked. Aside from the evident and massive impact graduate school had on my work, the shift in location and exposure to new art, people, and things propelled me into the work I am making presently.
I’m now located in middle Tennessee as an Associate Professor at Middle Tennessee State University where I instruct foundations-level art to undergraduate students. I’m a working artist and make paintings, drawings, and ceramics out of my office space and communal studios in the art building at MTSU. This is the fifth institution where I have maintained a professorship, and I am enthusiastic about planting deep roots in Murfreesboro. Alongside my personal body of work, I typically take commissioned murals and collaborate with my community for art events and classes. Most recently I completed a public-facing mural in my hometown of Franklin, Kentucky on a 30’x60’ wall, inspired by my childhood growing up there.
My personal creative work is made in reaction to our visually saturated world. Interested in how our perception of reality fluctuates between internal and external – consciousness and decoration, my work is in conversation with a revolving door of inquiry surrounding value hierarchies, object philosophies, and vision.
The human and object-like figures in my work are often situated in scenery that are retellings of my life. I look to the forms in my paintings as they acquire their own agency and I allow them to reject a polarized, hierarchical value structure in a way that theorists, like Graham Harmon, discuss. Object Oriented Ontology is a school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over nonhuman objects. All relations, including those between nonhumans or things, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness does, and exists on an equal footing with one another. This school of thought allows us to consider that we exist as objects in the universe with equal experience to a cat, mug, or car.
I make hand-painted and printed double-sided wallpaper tapestries to place the viewer in a loosely translated domestic scene surrounded by painting arrangements. Inside the paintings are figures, still lives, and a wide context of subject matter in varying degrees of recognizability. Invoking the familiar through the incorporation of ubiquitous objects such as wallpaper, mugs, and furniture that teeter between abstract and representation, the characters in my work embody the residue of objects in their spaces. I consider these elements to democratize space, and use object-oriented ontology as means to empathy.
Concerning sight, I find new relevancy in impressionism because of its relationship with vision. Rejecting symbolism and appreciating painting as decoration, the Nabis (a word in Hebrew meaning “prophet) were a group of rogue impressionist painters who set out to free color and form from symbolic meaning and representational functions to accept and celebrate them as moments of truth. As imperfect bodies unlike AI and cameras, we are physically incapable of recognizing the details of our reality all at once. Seeing color as a medium in and of itself, Pierre Bonnard made colors dance across lengths of canvases that depicted normal, domestic, and nature-inspired scenes from his life.
Using these platforms of question-making, I make work intuitively, through memory, and using photographs I’ve taken of my life, as well as image grabs from reality TV shows to develop subject matter including but not limited to still life, landscape, vegetation, figuration, vessels, interiors, and more. I implement printmaking and ceramics as other culminations of the subject matter and invite them to evolve organically, in the same fashion as the drawings and paintings.
I feel that through a constant interest in painting throughout history and sitting on the shoulders of giants, I aim to ask questions about us, our reality, and our place in the universe.
My schedule is open for commissions. For more information about pricing and scheduling, please reach out at kateiskinder@gmail.com or visit www.katekinder.com.
-submitted by the artist
