Katherine Minott

Katherine Minott
Tenants Harbor, Maine, USA

STATEMENT

With collage, all things are possible: a geisha performing a tea ceremony for a beloved dog, a sewing circle of women sitting atop a reclining zebra, a young woman levitating beneath a giant bee. In this surreal realm of juxtaposition and fantasy, new worlds are born. Thus the fragmented nature of the world, represented by the individual elements of the collage, ultimately sings of its togetherness–disjointed and different perhaps, but deeply connected nonetheless.

Katherine Minott, M.A., is an artist in love with the utter simplicity and potent possibility of analog collage (made with paper, scissors, glue–nothing digital). She finds inspiration from an array of resources–natural history illustrations from the 1800s, Gray’s Anatomy, a 100-year-old Braille bible–and creates 2D dreamscapes. When Minott spies a visually compelling image, she’ll slice it out, then continue the process until a collection of cut-outs has been assembled. To this end, she creates and arranges material in an ad hoc fashion, guided by shape, size, pattern, texture, and whim.

Her art takes aesthetic and conceptual cues (though not exclusively) from the Dada movement of the early twentieth century. Dada employed chance, randomness, and collage techniques in order to create and champion absurdity as a valid aesthetic mode.

Minott is intrigued by the re-use and manipulation of paper insofar as society increasingly moves toward a paperless culture beholden to digital forms. Maintaining a commitment to a paper-based medium functions as an archival endeavor just as much as an aesthetic one. Even if the materials aren’t headed to the landfill, the magazines and books she uses in her art have fallen out of commercial and economic favor. Excavating, for example, an ad from LIFE magazine circa the late 1950s enables an image over 60 years old and left for dead to re-enter systems of capital and production flows. Hence, thrift shops, yard sales, and clutter-phobic friends provide endless discarded and/or damaged materials into which Minott breathes life.

When not working in her studio, Minott can be found exploring the craggy shoreline and quiet forests of Maine. She is a published writer, photographer, and a former college instructor.

BIO

Before settling in Maine recently, Katherine Minott lived in Arizona and New Mexico for most of her adult life. Her aesthetic has been shaped by the region’s wide open horizons, cumulus clouds, and the ancient rock-bones of Mother Earth. Minott’s connection to the natural world began in Harvard, MA, where apple orchards, swamps, and Shaker cemeteries provided an important backdrop to her New England childhood. Exploration and discovery help to temporarily satiate some of her feverish curiosity about Life.

Minott earned a Master of Arts degree and, for over 18 years, instructed college students in the fine art of writing. Via alternative teaching delivery methods and opportunities, she taught a wide variety of student populations: incarcerated teens and adults, troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an incoming class of state police recruits. Minott also plied her craft as a freelance magazine writer, profiling one of the Discovery Channel’s hit stars, Cody Lundin of Dual Survival.

Now a full-time visual artist, she spends many hours immersed in the forest and along the rugged coastline, camera in hand, often “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown.” (Quote by Alan Watts)

ARTIST CONTACT

EMAIL | WEBSITE

IMAGES