Katherine Colborn is an artist living and working in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her BA in Studio Art and English from Xavier University and her MFA in Studio Art with a focus on Drawing and Painting at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Her work engages with themes of sanctuary and threshold, exploring the place of painting in a culture saturated with an abundance of imagery.

In recent years, she has traveled to Berlin and Mexico City, and has made multiple trips to Ireland, all for personal research and study. In 2015, she completed an artist residency at the Burren College of Art in County Clare. She has exhibited her work around the United States; recent exhibitions include a solo show at Greensboro Project Space in North Carolina, as well as group shows with the Bolivar Gallery at the University of Kentucky and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, and nationally juried exhibitions at Site: Brooklyn in New York City, Manifest Gallery in Ohio, and Durham Art Guild in North Carolina. Past exhibitions include a solo show at Xavier University Art Gallery and nationally juried exhibitions at Wichita Center for the Arts in Kansas and The Shirt Factory in New York. She currently teaches drawing, painting and foundations at Northern Kentucky University and has plans to complete an upcoming residency at Vermont Studio Center.

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” My studio work is fueled by a desire to alleviate the contemporary pressures of a culture propelled by competition and production. I use framing and perspective shifts to process images and structures at a time when—as a result of late capitalism and global crises—the concepts of home and rest are in constant flux. In an attempt to counter feelings of distance, upheaval and anxiety, painting is my quiet resistance: it encourages reflections upon transience and domestic life and offers space to navigate transition. It is an attempt to fix the unfixable—to pin down the fluid concept of the sacred.

Inspired by hermeneutic philosophy and apophatic theology, I find myself swinging between contradictory states of belief. I am chasing steadiness in a liminal place that encompasses a simultaneous coming and going. This experience manifests itself most often in protected spaces, thus I’ve been led in my work to themes of threshold and sanctuary. My works create a respite and an entryway. They remind us that painting, in its stillness and imaginative capabilities, teaches us to rest where we do not live.”