Photograph with a mottled light grey-white sky and a statue in the foreground from the shoulders up of a woman with long hair and hand supporting her head under the chin. The statue is worn, losing details, and a leaf pattern has been imposed over her face.

September 19, 2020 - February 28, 2021

Katherine Gulla: Passage

Katherine Gulla’s work has long been about the natural world and how we move through it. Passage presents work from three series—Path, Falling, and Fossil—whose names imply the process, travails, and remnants of the journey the artist envisions through her work.

There is an inherently meditative quality to all of Katherine Gulla’s works, something that is felt across media. In her studies of how the natural world responds to climate change, she translates the apprehension that permeates our daily lives into a coolly mysterious journey through the everyday landscape. Walks through places like the Arnold Arboretum, contemplative in their own right, become abstracted forms that transcend the natural world. Funerary monuments are juxtaposed with natural patterns, and the imprints that appear to float on these largely androgynous and stoic figures evoke ways in which the manmade and natural collide. Subtle, neutral, glacial tones remind us of absence, loss, and forces of nature beyond our control.