Kathryn St. Clair | Artist Statement

have always felt my work is about identity and understanding my place in the world. The symbols, attributes, and narratives associated with the Virgin Mary and the female saints have long been a source of inspiration for me. During my Fulbright grant to Spain, I began to explore the Catholic concept of the woman as the “pure, expectant vessel.” My interest in this Catholic symbolism and the representation of women now emerges in my work as metaphorical elements resembling eggs (fertility, rebirth, purity) and eyes (voyeurism, perception, judgment, the male gaze). What once began as a literal symbol of an egg in my paintings, now appears more like an egg from a human ovary. As I have become more interested in color, space and atmosphere, my work has evolved.

Upon moving to San Francisco six years ago, I began painting landscapes of Northern California, a practice that heightened my sense of color and informed my abstraction. I am also drawn to the “narratives” of color and the lofty, clouded, and dramatic atmospheres portrayed in 17th Century religious and allegorical paintings. I am interested in these egg and eye shapes- possibly visceral objects from the environment within the human body- and how they drift in the landscape of my paintings. I meditate on the various spaces and their density.

In my compositions, shapes drift, pull apart, and converge; they ascend and descend. They are at once pieces of something biological and ambiguous; bulbous and spherical, they float adrift or submerged in a nebulous space, pierced by light or obscured by haze.