Kate Harding

Kate Harding is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in Martinsville, Indiana and grew up mostly in rural Missouri on a small family farm. Her anchor is now New York City where she teaches at Parsons the New School of Design, Pratt Institute and School of Visual Arts, while in her practice she becomes immersed within the voices and histories of site, land and the local to invite consideration of embodied communication and more-than-human ways of knowing and precarity, creating and facilitating spaces for conversation and meeting.

Recently in residence in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland on the Isle of Eigg, she lived on the croft of Captain Celia Bull, tending her small flock of Shetland sheep and began to learn the skills of sailing aboard Bull’s high latitude sailboat, Selkie. Harding brought the process of making inks and charcoals from land learned previously with Aimée Burg (founder/director of Zero Foot Hills) while in residence at Zero Foot Hills in rural Durham, Connecticut, and began to find the colors and textures of the land of her ancestors (Scotland) while in conversation with and learning from the island and weather itself and the generous community of women there in long walks and talks in land and sea, amongst the ever changing atmosphere.

She is currently on board Selkie for the Winter Voyage (January through mid-April 2023) as a member of the crew under Celia Bull and in the process of making video work, writing, as well as paintings and drawings from inks made on Isle of Eigg. The expedition left Isle of Eigg Scotland on January 13th and will be traveling with mind to weather and seas, up the west coast of Scotland and over to Norway… and back again. You can follow the progress of the Selkie Winter Voyage on the tracker and blog page: https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/SV-Selkie/

(Instagram: @thekateharding.com)

Structured field experiments generate material that then transforms mostly video documentation into drawings, draped paintings, sculpture or interactive installation. My garment construction background often provides a metaphoric structure, and landscape is acknowledged as resonant entities in constant communication. This exploration of often unacknowledged dialog is anchored by historical research, science, corporeal knowledges and oral histories. Recently, I’ve oriented towards human interaction and perceived divisions, whether through the metaphor of depicting landscape in layered, reaching, abstracted space in drawing, embroideries and paintings or facilitating conversational sites such as the cushion works in Seen Some Things or my radio show, Bicoastal Carpool.

Subverting clear representation, I seek to undermine and complicate the historic convention of control through readability championed in works meant to be perceived “at-a glance.” This examination of specificity, ecologies and inter-subjective perception considers unacknowledged dialogs, embodied communication and agency where landscape is acknowledged as resonant entities in constant communication. Inviting consideration of gesture, ways of knowing and memory, sometimes systematic and at other times intuitive drawings fragment the depiction of terrain in layered, reaching, abstracted space. My interest is in the dispersion of knowledges and lifeways in communication with each other within a terrain at a given moment, and this is vegetal, animal, mineral, atmospheric, energetic, etc.

My hope is that if this communication can be acknowledged as resonant voice within "landscape," there can be a decentered place of meeting across perceived divides of othering.