Katherine Taylor
Katherine Taylor, West Texas Lady, 2011
Katherine Taylor is a full time artist working in Little Elm Texas, just north of Dallas. She earned her BFA from Texas A&M University – Commerce in 1998 and her MFA from Syracuse University in 2002.
She was a resident artist at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 2002, Snake Kiln Culture Park in Shui-Li Taiwan in 2006, and Liv I leire in Oslo, Norway in 2009. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in several museum collections.
Artist Statement (Not So Fast, 2012)
I am interested in how the perception of a place is created. A Place is a collection of human experiences in a location. It is full of history but challenged by contradictory memories. There are both broad areas and tiny points that become places, real or imagined. They can be rooted in a landscape or nestled in a building. Places are special because they are shared, and they are precarious because they are always challenged by conflicting perceptions.
Many of my recent sculptures have been about specific local Texas places: people, buildings, cities, and regions. I use nerikomi colored porcelain slabs to build many of the forms for my sculptures. The nerikomi patterns give the surface of my sculptures an orderly structure that relates to the geometry of the agricultural fields and cityscapes of the region where I live. Each form is designed to represent a physical or emotional aspect of a real object, body, or plant. Some forms are literal representations, and others are altered by memory and perception. Thick translucent glazes create a haze of bleeding color that unites the numerous parts of the sculpture into a single unit that represents the experience of a place.