KATE COHEN

MEDIUM

Mixed Media

ARTIST STATEMENT

The point of life is to experience love and create beauty.
And I guess you could say I have a thing about birds.

ARTIST BIO

Kate Cohen once had a ceramics teacher who at the end of each semester would have students select their best pieces and take them to a long hallway. Then they’d mow their creations down with a bowling ball. They’d smash into pieces! “The idea of art is to go beyond what’s precious. Otherwise you’ll only go so far,” she says. “That means no growth.”

The self-employed artist knows something about growth, and for that matter, what it means to be an artist, to live riveted to getting your best work out of yourself. Cohen, an artist who keeps engaging the ‘what if?’ allows the idea to determine what materials and medium will be next. It’s constant experimentation.

Cohen assembles diverse, often aged materials and arranges them into complex constructions. She seduces the viewer by revealing her creative process and thus taps into the collective unconscious where symbols are transformed from autobiographical details to universal truths.

Cohen has intuited so much along the way, but has also worked hard at learning. She has earned a double M.F.A., one in Painting and the other in Sculpture, at Washington State University. She began with a B.F.A. in Ceramics at the Cleveland Institute of Art.