Kate Henderson

Gesture describes the energy in life; it represents the vibration in everything. 

Kate Henderson grew up in Indiana with parents who had careers in STEM. The scientific side of her nature is ever-present, yet holds structural tension with narrative, spiritual and metaphysical concerns. As a creator, her impulses embody both deep appreciation of nature as it exists, and an ever-present yearning for an ecstatic state. Aiming to bridge and ultimately reconcile these dualities, Kate’s work stands in subtle resistance against fundamentalism of all kinds, favoring an endless search for meaning across complex, multiple worlds. After years of working at Yale in IT and design, she now teaches at Paier College of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and serves as the Director of Kehler-Liddell Gallery in New

Fields of (Im)possibility: Abstraction and a Sense of Place

Just as poetry has been described as the practice of creating “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” the abstract worlds to which I’ve grown accustomed possess their own integrity, rules and constraints. When I see this operating successfully in the work of other artists (Cicely Brown comes immediately to mind), I greet it with confident acceptance just as one acknowledges the reality of a tree in the park. In my own work I aim for a specifically arresting visual phrase to emerge, causing the eye to linger, repeat, and penetrate to deeper layers.

Using a combination of gestural and contour line, Kate translates elements of the natural world into a place of imagined passages. “I frequently start paintings using collage materials”. The collage elements start with my own drawings torn up and reassemble in a deconstructionism manner. This acts as both a jumping off place compositionally, but more importantly it acts as an underlaying secret that is woven into my paintings. The initial meaning is obscured to the viewer, but it becomes a physical memory from which the architectural mesh of the painting is built. No matter how far away the painting strays from the original collage imagery, its essence is embedded into the structure that becomes a physical memory. Just underneath the surface you see the traces of edges of the paper.

In the Cytoillusions series the artist’s scientific and design backgrounds come together to create fictionalized worlds built by cellular structures that reveal relationships between macro- and micro-level views of the natural world. Sets of these substantial, richly saturated graphic prints have been sold to private collections and exhibited in galleries and health care settings, earning her place on the coveted Lumen Prize Art + Technology Global Tour. She welcomes inquiries about commissions for personalized or family cell portraits, and has particular interest in the mitochondrial DNA that links all maternal relations.

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Kate received her MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University, and a BFA in painting and a BA in art history at Indiana University. She has received many awards for her pastels including the Franklin Alexander Award from the Connecticut pastel society and featured in Exhibeo Art Magazine. In her design and digital work, she has earned awards from Artiac and is a Lumen Prize Global Tour Recipient. Her work has been shown at Creative Tech week NY, The Lumen Prize global tour at The Auditorium on Broadway NY, Degas Society in New Orleans, New Haven Lawn Club, Ethel Walker School, Simsbury CT, NEST in Bridgeport CT, Ridgefield Camera Works, Franklin Street Works in Stamford CT, BRAG at the University of Bridgeport Schelfhaudt Gallery, Bridgeport CT, Connecticut Hospice, Creative Arts in New Haven, Yale-Sterling Library, and Art Place in New Haven.