Collaborating with Excess

exhibit description

Kathryn Knudsen combines traditional media, abstract forms, and found objects to produce an artistic vision with the intent to heal, refashion and beautify. In her contemplative refashioning the world of discarded consumption, the oddness of the shapes, the opalescence of the textures, the quirkiness of the colors become a wholly new experience in itself.

Click here to view the virtual exhibition.

Artist Statement

My work utilizes a variety of traditional media, abstract forms, and found objects to produce an artistic vision with the intent to heal, refashion, and beautify. The result–an unpredictable labyrinth of old recycled clothing, unwanted paintings, neglected thread, discarded paper, necklace beads, and other recycled materials. Picking up objects that might otherwise languish in scrap heaps, second-hand clothing stores, or boxes of discarded memories, my aim is to reintegrate the power of transformed media with therapeutic promise of beauty and artistic experience. In these works the possibility of refashioning the world of discarded consumption becomes an artistic reality, something more than an aspiration, a wholly new experience in itself. The work realizes that the very fabric of our culture and everyday lives can be recast and reclaimed, just as nature does in its endless march of life and desire. The oddness of the shapes, the opalescence of the textures, the quirkiness of the colors–all a deliberate collaboration with the materials which at first seem unimportant or used up, only to become something new and contemplative.