Kate Metten (born 1991, Vancouver, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist whose material investigations into oil painting and ceramics oscillate between abstraction and figuration. Her work borrows from the entirety of painting’s history and that of ceramic anthropology. This methodology allows a flexibility to address painterly concerns with clay, research into colour theory, visual perception and the still life, while also reflecting on Modernist philosophies of the Bauhaus, the unmaking of craft and material hierarchies. She is deeply concerned with phenomenology and the physicality of form. The internal logic of her artwork is determined by intuitive construction and response to material; Images and objects arise out of multi-layers of decision making to develop forms that are at once recognizable yet unfamiliar. The indexical quality of both painting and ceramic render dynamic impressions of mass and surface that preserve evidence of the hand and mind in motion. Metten’s preoccupation with the mechanics of looking, the psychological play of optical illusions, and our brain’s response to reductionist imagery confronts the viewer with the conditioning of their own perception.
