Katie Swan

Katie Swan is an artist, mother, and educator currently living and working in Kansas City, Missouri. She received her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at Mills College in Oakland CA in 2019 and her Bachelors of Art (BA) from UCLA in Sociology and Political Science. She has a disciplined history in athletics including throwing discus at UCLA and attaining her 500 HR E-RYT in Yoga. She traveled to Denmark to work as an artist assistant and later relocated to the Bay Area to study under Nancy Selvin and other influential ceramic artists. Katie managed Merritt ceramics, Clay by the Bay and Brushstrokes Studio in Berkeley, CA with a knack for creating communal art spaces. Her life passions of healing, somatic movement, and ritual are woven into her art practice.

Artist Statement

I illustrate the ways physical bodies are susceptible, the moments of breaking, and the lasting marks made by an ephemeral material self. My work is concerned with cycles, time, decay, and interconnectedness. I decolonize the cyclical effects of time on organic matter from the dominant social narrative of progress over time. These organic cycles of movement and entropy are nonlinear and reflexive.

The work is a meditation on the shifting materiality of life itself. My process weaves forms into rituals and rituals into the process. I draw endless chalk circles, walk barefoot in clay, ask participants to walk through clay halls, pour and carry buckets of water with no destination, and photograph clay urns dissolving with honey and ashes. This produces a lived sensory experience as well as objects for the viewer to consider.

My work archives state changes with photography, time lapse video, text, and ceramics used in ritual performance. My installations are made by virtue of an invocation of a “safe space” in which the witness or participant is a co-creator. The ritual of honoring state changes within a life cycle in a communal space creates a culturally ambiguous and universally accessible place of solace and illumination.