Katie Green
“I love these small portraits artist, Katie Green, describes as little prompt for human connection.”
— Sandra Botnen, curator
“As a woman it is still an intimidating thing for me. Definitely creating helps me to intimately connect with myself as the hand work involved in my mask making is a calming preparation to stand up, be seen and heard as an artist, but I keep having to remind myself that it is OK to take up space.”
Day 7 introduces artist Katie Green. At this point, I hope you are following along day by day because my conversation with Green digs deeper into the realm of discovery than any previous day. Our conversation builds upon, most notably, the women’s issues discussed with Helena Wadsley, who walked us through some of the feminist movements that have fostered recognition for women in fine art. In many ways it is the artist's job to either reject or advance the artistic ideals that precede them. At thirty-one years of age, Katie Green is the youngest artist we have met so far, and the issues we discuss are those of a new generation.
Green reaches beyond current trends of contemporary art to examine the very way we embody our sense of self, how we animate our bodies, and inhabit our skin. Her work is about unbridled self-expression, or perhaps it is more true to say it is about the unbridling the already expressed self. “There is a lot of emotional processing and paying attention to synchronicity in my work,” she says. “It took a while to build the trust to work from a purely internal place, but when I do, the result is so pleasing.”
She started working on character portraits in 2018. Over a period of months, she created one to five paintings per day, watching the visual landscape of her emotions become revealed. When she eventually stepped back and stood before her collection of invented characters, she found herself wanting to know more about them. She began making masks in their likeness, wearing them, and exploring how they might move. Her art practice now includes an effort to embody each character as a means of learning more about them. “People have deep emotional responses to my characters, making them great entry points to discussing the various narratives people are going through.
These characters are like little prompts for human connection,” she says.
Katie Green’s curiosity is unstoppable. She further wants to know the kind of work her characters might engage in and their personality quirks. Like any committed artist, her work eventually becomes about world building or mind-mapping as Green calls it. When I asked what words she might uses to describe her world of characters, she replies, “open, between binaries, and full of potential. It’s a transformative place they all share,” she says.
“What I love about creating my work is the possibility I encounter, to conjure something that I know wouldn’t otherwise exist,” says Green. “Her world explores an expanse of often androgynous characters hanging in a dreamy white space. Stylized androgyny and her use of the word “binary” led me to ask about her own sexual identification. She is happy to talk about the subject since she says she is seriously stripping down the systemic issues sexuality and gender to examine what are the recurring sources of her own attraction. She presents herself as an attractive young woman but takes nothing for granted. Her thinking is alive, and the conversation hypnotic. Talking to her, I find myself in touch with this “in-between” space where the relevance of our private anatomy crumbles to the ground. Her desire to create from this space aligns with the freedom she finds available there. Spontaneously, we burst into laughter at which point I better understand the non-binary gender identification than ever before, as quite simply a rejection of conventional male and female role playing. At this point I feel like I am living in her world. Suddenly she breaks the giddy laughter with what I believe is her most encompassing artist statement. “What it all comes down to… all that really matters... is kindness…to others and to the self.”
On that note, Green wants to talk about the public art installation she did in 2019 in the east village, a diverse urban neighborhood in Calgary, Alberta. Her installation involved 13 participants, each given their choice of one of Green’s masks. Within a context of art therapy, she photographed the participants wearing her masks, allowing the anonymity of working behind a mask gave participants an opportunity to step into that ambiguous space where new aspects of themselves could be revealed, shared and accepted with kindness.
It is clear Katie Green is drawing from a deep well, but next I want to talk about the actual artwork she produces, namely her watercolor paintings and masks. I introduce the idea of textiles as it relates to her mask making and the history of women returning to their matrilinear crafts as a means of creating inroads to the art world. At thirty years thirty one of age, she still feels challenged by breaking down barriers but she is equally concerned with the courge needed to take up space. “As a woman it is still an intimidating thing for me. Definitely creating helps me to intimately connect with myself as the hand work involved in my mask making is a calming preparation to stand up, be seen and heard as an artist, but I keep having to remind myself that it is OK to take up space.”
And then there are her watercolors, where she is most prolific as an artist. She loves the precision and unpredictability of ink on paper. Her paintings start by wetting the paper, randomly dropping ink, and waiting for the image to show up. Unpredictability drives the liminal quality of her imperfect figures that seem to appear from the ethers. As she describes her method, I picture my favorite painting I have seen so far. One of her characters with extra-long arms is depicted from the waist up - its most prominent feature, its nipples.
Should Katie Green be the artist I decide to add to my collection this month, I believe this nipple figure is the one I would choose. I am sure there is much we can read into based on my choice, and there is much we can read into Green for having created it, but talking to Katie Green it is clear that none of it really matters unless it is born out of kindness.
Available Works
"Soul Rider" - Acrylic Ink on Paper - 30'“ x 48” - $3750 CDN
"Go Inside, You Are Everything" - Acrylic Ink on Paper - 22'“ x 30” - $2200 CDN
"Holding" - Acrylic Ink on Paper - 24” x 40” - $3050 CDN
"Lovers" - Acrylic Ink on Paper - 30'“ x 48” - $3750 CDN
"Resilience" - Acrylic Ink on Paper - 22'“ x 30” - $2550 CDN
"Practice Revealing Yourself" - Acrylic Ink on Paper - 22'“ x 30” - $2200 CDN