Katherine Pickering

August 2024

Katherine Pickering is based in Kelowna, British Columbia, on Okanagan-Syilx territory, where she is a Lecturer in painting and drawing in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus. 

Pickering’s artistic practice investigates the language of abstract painting through assemblages and other sculptural gestures. Her shaped and folded paintings from the series lean, stumble, spill, sway, fold reference mutable scenes from the nighttime landscape such as the spill of reflected light off a puddle of water. These works, created by soaking shaped acrylic paintings in hot water to enhance their pliability, emphasize the ambiguity that we experience at night when sight is limited and touch, kinesthesia, and our imaginations fill in the blanks. In Behind the Studio Door, a series started during an exhibition residency at the Lake Country Public Art Gallery in 2019, Pickering borrows both mundane and painterly objects from her home studio/garage to create assemblages that reference windows while evoking a sense of playful improvisation. 

Pickering received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus in 2006 and a Master in Fine Arts in Studio Art from Concordia University, Montréal, QC in 2009. She has participated in several artist residencies, including Vermont Studio Centre, Johnson, Vermont, USA, 2011, 2013 & 2016; Akureyri Artists Studio, Akureyri, Iceland, 2013; The Room’s Terra Nova National Park residency in Newfoundland, 2011; Toni Onley Artists’ Project, Island Mountain Arts, Wells, BC 2011; AmongOtherThings, Bolu, Turkey 2011; Studio Beluga, Montréal, QC, 2011, and Figure in a Mountain Landscape thematic residency at the Banff Centre, AB, 2008. Starting in 2010, she founded the Bus from Guadalajara Artist in Residence Project in Ajijic, Mexico.