WORD

ARTISTS

KATIE MURKEN
Oakland Based Mixed Media Artist

Artist's Statement

I create art as a way to transmute injustices to women into a source of power.  I work with everyday, abject materials that contain the essence of these injustices and I use my creative process to transform them into works of art that reveal the beauty in the act of giving care.  I gravitate to ubiquitous materials cast-off from consumer culture because for me they represent the invisibility and devaluation of women’s labor.  Throughout the course of my career I have worked with a range of materials and images that correlate to my personal and ancestral experiences of domesticity as an oppressive and insidious institution. Telephone books, plastic shopping bags, grocery ads and barbed wire are materials that speak to me of capitalist consumerism and its ability to bind and oppress women by commodifying and colonizing care. Using humble and direct techniques based in quilting, piecework, collage and assemblage I approach these objects with an attitude of maternal tenderness and the desire to breathe new life into something that feels hopeless.  Through my careful and attentive reworking I transform these cast-off materials into powerful manifestations of hope and healing. 

Process

My process is driven by transformation and the desire to breathe new life into cast-off materials.  This process reflects my personal journey as a woman and mother who has borne witness to the effects of capitalism and patriarchy on a woman’s sense of worth and personal power.  I am drawn to found materials that embody a sense of hopelessness and abjection.  Over the course of my career I have worked with telephone books, plastic shopping bags and currently barbed wire.  I begin by acquainting myself with the material and experimenting with its form and features to understand how it can be transformed.  I immerse myself in this phase of the process and trust intuition so that the material acts as a guide and teacher for how it wishes to transform and what it wants to communicate.  I do not consider myself a conceptual artist, but rather one who listens closely.  Each project is unique in method and outcome, but I tend to use different forms of deconstruction to “take apart” the material.  Then I identify how I will integrate these different parts.  It might mean adding color, or creating a compositional arrangement, but there is always an intention to create wholeness and this reflects my inner journey as well.

Videos

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/707924735

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/780471582