work on paper
Artist Statement
Kate Higley
Kate Higley began printmaking in the early nineteen eighties while living and working in Saudi Arabia. In seven years, she traveled extensively around the middle and near east, spending time in both the desert and the mountains, particularly, the Himalayas. These visual experiences shaped her aesthetic, in particular, the sight of stark land masses as seen from a great height, often airplanes. Upon her return to the United States, she studied and taught biology, receiving an interdisciplinary master's degree at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. This foray into the biological is deeply rooted in Kate's work as well. She and her family made their home in Washington, DC in winter and Wolfeboro, NH in summers for many years. In Washington, she taught art at a private girls' school where she maintained a printmaking studio on the campus. In those years, she was also affiliated with the Corcoran College of Art as a student and lab technician. Her work is in two of the Corcoran College's print portfolios. In June, 2007 Kate moved to New Hampshire full time. Her work is in both public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad.
I am experimental by nature and frequently combine several printmaking methods in one work. In my years in the Middle East, it was often difficult to obtain materials. Shortages were the birth of that tendency. I will re-use plates and layer new imagery over old or cut up substrates to create more work. I keep "failed" prints for years and then try another method or two as an overlay. This system is fraught with potential disaster, but I like walking that line. I print myself into corners and then find ways out….sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Things can get lost in the layers and then found again. In my recent work, I am expressing my sense of ambiguity between the macro and the micro. Leading the viewer to see the continuity found in the visual structure of mountains, coastlines, river deltas, rolling hills and muscle tissue, plant cells, even gray matter is the goal. Lately, I think about being aloft and birdlike structures seem to fly in from nowhere. They are probably harbingers of another body of work waiting "in the wings."