My art practice is a search for authenticity — a way to reveal what lies beneath the surface of both personal and collective experience. Working in the traditions of abstract expressionism and automatic surrealism, I allow intuition and unconscious imagery to guide me, drawing from memory, scholarship, and the deeper strata of the collective unconscious and the generative.
Materials are central to this process. I work with clay, ink on rice paper, acrylic paint, and increasingly with digital media, choosing textures and layers that invite both experimentation and discovery. These choices reflect my belief that art emerges most fully when the hand and mind are in dialogue with matter itself.
Thematically, my work explores the intersections of individuality, resistance, and renewal. My background in anthropology, labor studies, and international relations has shaped my sensitivity to structures of power, inequality, and conformity. Just as I once studied the hierarchies of social, economic, and political life, I now trace those tensions in line, form, and color. In this way, my art becomes a counterpoint to uniformity, an insistence on freedom, and a meditation on the possibility of transformation.
I am especially inspired by the European and American Modernists, whose departure from classical representation opened the way for multi-material, layered approaches to image-making. Their courage in breaking with tradition resonates with my own desire to challenge conventions and to let unresolved tensions remain visible within the work.
For me, art is both meditative and resistant — an act of mindfulness while pushing against the pressures of mediocrity, hierarchy, and conformity in contemporary life. Each piece is an invitation to inhabit the liminal spaces between intention and revelation. Ultimately, my work strives to embody Theodore Adorno’s aesthetics, primarily described as a negative dialectic—an act of resistance realized through the interplay of creativity, spirit, and intellect.
Art by Kate W 