Katherine Adkins

“My paintings mirror orthogonal systems with prismatic and textural units. Our world has invented systems that seek to limit the space we inhabit and the way we spend our time, attempting to put us in our place. I paint my own puzzles to regain my agency. I use world building languages of domestic craft and nostalgic video games. The pixel exists across time and spaces, trans-temporally and cross-culturally manifesting expression and escape from oppressive systems. My paintings patch together disparate painting sessions, becoming picture planes of time travel. I chase the mystery of mapped edges of time. Could the edge of our existence be a scalloped cloud, a fringed cloth, a rounded pod, a rectilinear plane, or a wrinkled ruffle?

Each brushstroke catalogs a choice made. I meander through disjointed passages of painted pattern, bridging disparate motifs, filling each piece with an all-over spread. By painting patches in a nonlinear format, jumping from one passage to the next, I show the past, present, and future within one picture plane.



I create open-ended abstraction as a window for viewers to enter, with their own feelings and associations separate from, but connected to, my personal storyline. 
I use acrylic and oil paint, sometimes mixed with aggregates like sand and foils. My substrates include either shaped paper pulp forms or canvas. Recycled pulp substrates resemble stony textural slates evoking resurrected material, while canvas substrates carry the lineage of painting's history.



My paintings chase the manifestation of love and passion through time. Paint’s fluidity mirrors the fluidity of time, depicting and transcending the systems to which we belong.”