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The art that Katie Green creates evokes a sense of emotion, providing a healing process that manifests watercolour beings that are both eerily ethereal and magically whimsical.
Vestibule explores the spaces in-between, inviting us to meet characters and environments that emerge in quiet unfolding.
Eyes watch both timid and acute as they search through washes of colour. Figures emerge through formless moments and uncertain shadows reach out for what seems possible. Vestibule is an exploration of abstract feelings and forms manifested through paintings on paper and immersive mural compositions.
Katie’s work expresses a sensitivity that is both intimate and personal, transforming what is familiar into new remembering. Painting becomes a form of therapeutic release – the act of allowing these characters to emerge helps to repair something within.
The images feel like ethereal encounters. Some appear like spirits or ghosts while others feel familiar yet unknown. Many characters exist as singular portraits living within a greater constellation of beings that transfer feelings into the surrounding space. These feelings create an emotional tapestry connecting the artwork to the viewer, the viewer to the space, and viewers to each other. Though the characters appear in physical form, it is less about the portraits and more about what is contained within them. What we cannot see but nonetheless experience is equally important. Each work is an act of participation with the viewer – there is a relationship waiting to be formed. The characters appear still until they are witnessed by an audience. The paintings depend on the resonance of the viewer and their interaction with the emotion it elicits inside them. Do these characters live inside the artist? The viewer? The environment? Where do they come from? What do they have to say?
Katie’s painting process is intuitive and improvisational. Whether working on canvas or paper, water is the fluid carrier of the images that emerge. Paintings start with drops that bleed into a set of eyes, the shape of a face or perhaps the posturing of a shoulder. Paint drips down the surface of a canvas to pour and pool into forms that reveal what they want to become. For Katie, the process of painting is one of searching as she waits for something or someone to emerge. Being in relationship with the medium itself allows Katie to enter a place within herself that is responsive,
meditative, and guided. In the liminal space of waiting there is a relationship between influencing the form and surrendering to the medium itself. Inside this in-between presence surprises emerge and characters from unseen places make themselves known.
In a time when we are continuously being told how to feel, Vestibule creates a moment of suspension. The resonance of these mystical portraits can guide our encounters with self, others, and unseen realms; helping to distill our thoughts and emotions.
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