Kate Collyer: To Last Frontiers

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

“Wonder is one of the most powerful forces with which we are born.” It can be simple to take for granted how much there actually is around us. There is a tether that pulls me towards the unknown, the urgent, and the unseen.  Whether obvious or more subdued I find a landscape; driven by our climate and its effects on the world around us.  It has embedded itself into my work – diving headfirst into process driven investigations, research, and exploration.

When you have sailed through ice-filled fjords, knowing the area will be forever altered, the need to defend them becomes vital.  My work is precise, meant to evoke the environment and to dissect it, break it down to its most minute forms.  Giving a permanence that is at odds with its natural reference.

What can be done to create awareness of our shifting climate?  What do we think of when we envision our dwindling wilderness?  How is our atmosphere and what is beyond that barrier altering our place, and what are we doing to that space?  Entrenched in scientific inquiry, my works pay homage to landscapes of land, sea, and sky while referencing their dissipation, phenomena, and beauty.

“There is a love that no one remembers,” an evocative thought that I cannot help but mull-over when reflecting on these areas filled with unknown complexities.  Places that, if not for my physical reflections, will be lost with time.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kate Collyer is originally from Buffalo, New York.  Now living in the Hudson Valley of New York, she works as an artist and educator.  She received her Masters of Fine Arts degree from the State University of New York at New Paltz Printmaking Program, where she currently teaches and has a Bachelor’s degree in Art Education from the State University of New York College at Potsdam and Saint Lawrence University.  Her work has been exhibited internationally, most notably in, the SMTG Krakow Printmaking Triennial Main Exhibition, in Krakow, Poland for their 2015 and 2018 exhibitions, and the LITHO-Kielce International Lithography Triennial.  She is the 2014 recipient of the Southern Graphics Council International Graduate Fellowship Award and a 2016 artist in residence for the Arctic Circle Residency.  By focusing on the concept of place and the historical bond that we have created with the landscape she hopes that viewers can empathize with the sites she reveals in her art. Her goal is to create prints within a variety of mediums and techniques to expand the definition of what a print can be.  Currently her work focuses on the Arctic landscapes she has explored in Greenland, Svalbard, and Iceland.  Each piece gives viewers the opportunity to interpret and reimagine, drawing insight from her recollections of place.