kate muehlemann

Every day, we move through the world interacting within the limits of our physical bodies, with identities we’ve both inherited and adopted as we’ve grown, all of which contribute to individual experience.  I use the physical form to search for what is constant beneath the surface of these ever-changing, and transient external conditions.

As I apply paint to a canvas, I imagine applications of paint as each of the various layers that become a cemented piece of identity, more and more tactile, and able to be experienced through the senses as something the mind can comprehend and define.  What is lost in this process, both in the painting and the human experience, is the possibility that is present prior to these limiting and defined parts that make up the tangible “self”.  A single brushstroke obscures the vastness that came before it, and shapes it more and more into a finite form with every pass.

I am interested in what comes before our ideas of who we are, and what remains once the things we use to define ourselves fall away. I paint and make work to explore and understand the more subtle realities of mortality, spirit, possibility, connection, god.