Inside Little Worlds

By Katie Green (Calgary, Alberta)

84 Elgin
August 2023, Up Here 9

Sponsored by the City of Greater Sudbury and Sudbury Tourism

Photo: Brandon Michael Gray

Katie’s painting process is intuitive and improvisational. Whether working on canvas or paper, water is the fluid carrier of the images that emerge. Paintings start with drops that bleed into a set of eyes, the shape of a face or perhaps the posturing of a shoulder. For Katie, the process of painting is one of searching as she waits for something or someone to emerge. Katie’s imagery creates opportunities for audiences to feel into our vast emotions. The scenes she creates therefore contain paradox and contradiction; they are simultaneously playful and awkward, eery and comforting, timid, and exuberant. Within “Inside Tiny Worlds,” characters gaze curiously at each other and at an audience who gazes back at them. In paused moments of watchful looking, beings, shapes, and interactions continue to reveal themselves. For a moment, we are suspended together inside an ethereal world, where characters guide our encounters with self, others, and magical realms.

Photo: Brandon Michael Gray

Katie Green

Katie Green works in various scales and mediums to explore public space and create transformational community experiences. Her intimate watercolour personas are eerie and ethereal, emotionally visceral reflections of a gritty and unapologetic exploration into the complexity of the human experience. Her murals are wildly immersive scenes of fantasy with characters intertwined with flora and fauna caught in mid-action at an architectural scale. Increasingly, her mural projects involve communities in a process of mask making that result in large-scale public expressions of hidden identities, emotional realities, and internal experiences.