May 2013

Fine Arts Center of Kershaw County in Camden, SC, Features Works by Katie Walker

Fine Arts Center of Kershaw County in Camden, SC, is presenting Sitting on the Floor With 600 Sheets of Paper, an exhibition by Katie Walker, on view in the Bassett Gallery, through May 9, 2013.

Walker hails from Greenville, SC She has exhibited in the Greenville County Museum of Art, the Spartanburg (SC) Museum of Art, the Pickens County (SC) Museum of Art and History, the Columbia (SC) Museum of Art and the Georgia Museum of Art. Her work was included in the 2005 Florence, Italy, Biennale, where she was an award winner.

Walker regularly shows in galleries across the Southeast. She has taught at Furman University in Greenville, where she earned her BA in studio art. She holds an MFA from the University of Georgia and studied and taught in the university’s Cortona Study Abroad program in Italy.

Walker’s work has appeared in New American Paintings, Vol. 40, 2002, and she recently closed an exhibition, organized by Columbia’s if ART Gallery at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios. Her work is essentially Abstract Expressionist with elements of Minimalism and geometric art, without the hard edges and clinical feel.

“It’s hard to pinpoint influences,” Walker says, “and I hate doing it because you get categorized so easily. But Conrad Marca-Relli is a major influence, and maybe Helen Frankenthaler. I admire her work though I think that my work looks very different. But I like to work with watered-down paint, like her, and I pour paint. I like Robert Motherwell, too, but I don’t study him. In my small pieces I like to play with scale, like he did. The small pieces seem monumental because the shape in them is so large.”

Walker works with brayers, spackling scrapers and her hands. And she pours and squirts from plastic bottles, sometimes with two or more holes to create multiple streams, parallel lines. She mostly uses unprimed canvas, applying thin layers of acrylic paint, though her small pieces are often on wood, painted with oils.

The Fine Arts Center is funded in part by the Frederick S. Upton Foundation and the South Carolina Arts Commission, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding provided by the City of Camden, Kershaw County, and BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina along with donations from businesses and individuals.

For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Center at 803/425-7676, extension 300 or visit (www.fineartscenter.org).

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