Catherine Kernan

The premise that human relationships with the earth are reciprocal and move in cycles of repetition and variation underlies all my work.  Cycles of growth and decay are ingrained in human perception at a sub-conscious level, and human behavior elicits responses from the earth, a relationship critical to acknowledge as environmental systems are under increasing threat of mutation, and collapse.

My imagery comes from moving across the earth, progressing from depictions of particular places to a focus on the fundamental equivalencies between forces and their visual expression. The swirl of lichen on a rock is equivalent to the swirl of tidal pools. Geologic formations are the flow of liquids at a slower rate. All changes occur on different time scales. As my art has matured so has my “seeing” of the deeper commonalities beyond the visible.

I embed some questions in my work, and suggest some answers. How do we conflate space and time? How do we reconcile fragmented lives and memories? How do experiences become a vocabulary for visual expression? How do we maintain a visceral connection with the earth in our synthetic, and digitized culture?

Increasingly abstract, my most recent work takes a narrative stance toward memories and space. The images ask, even challenge, the viewer to re-assemble the fragments of information by summoning memories of moving through a dynamic landscape. The repetition of full or partial images signals the compression of time into simultaneous space, past, current and anticipated. The vocabulary is one of fragmentation, and reflections, intrusions and discontinuities to interrupt the conventional assumption of time as linear. 

Carving wood is a return to a familiar material of my upbringing as the daughter of a forester. The wood blocks provide structure as well as scale, and freedom to let the layers interact with unpredictable results.  By re-combining the blocks, shattering an image and interrupting its unity, the artificiality of “designing” is eliminated. Once cut, I am liberated from any calculated “composition”. The shapes arise from layering collisions and interference.

My processes are unorthodox. The blocks are plywood, and I cut with hand and power tools. The Akua soy-based inks have a long drying time, no toxic fumes, and are cleaned with soap and water, thus environmentally responsible.  I exploit the interactions of different viscosities of inks for subtle poetic and dramatic graphic results. The transfer are always a guess, and usually a surprise, positive or otherwise. 

In the best of my work, when the magic happens, when I am in a zone of intuition, the images become multi-faceted.  Analogous to the incompleteness of memory, the spaces elide, the layers collide, and the infusion of light becomes a unifying element in a landscape of shifting boundaries, and shape shifting transformations.