Bio

As a public artist in San Francisco, Katy worked with the Department of Public Works, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and was mentored by the team at the Exploratorium’s Studio for Public Spaces. She was formally trained in printmaking and drawing at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Art and Design.

This body of work began in 2020–with all it entailed—and a year after becoming a mother. I was mostly apartment-bound, nursing around a 24hr clock, walking city streets in which all the trees and plants were thriving, untended. Structure and spontaneity, restraint and spaciousness, organization and tempo, commitment and action, surrender and discipline were intertwined in ways previously unexplored.

These drawings are drawn with levity, focus and whim. Deliberately absent of gestural marks, I use only a straight-edge and ink; curved textures and shapes emerge. I do not sketch. At any point I can ‘see’ how to balance a piece, 95% of the time I choose not to. Each set of strokes, and a life of impressions, inform the next set of choices. Failure is always an option!

Katy is also informed by 25+ years of practice and teaching of yoga.