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Kathleen was born in South Africa where she studied Fine Art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation and even though she no longer live there, the forms and textures of Africa can still be seen and felt all through her work. She feels very fortunate to have had a childhood in Africa, surrounded by the colour and rhythm of the African people.
She has always had a strong attraction to primitive art and it has had a big influence in her work. She loves the simplicity of form and the two-dimensional quality of the designs that you see in traditional works of art. She now works primarily in clay using primitive methods of firing like sawdust and Naked Raku, because she feel that smoke is a more natural integration between form and surface than glaze; also it does not compromise the tactile quality of the clay, something that is very important to her in her pieces. She wants her work to invite touch just as much as she wants them to be visually pleasing.
Kathleen now lives in Whistler BC and although her work still shows a very strong African influence, she has definitely been inspired by her new West coast environment. This inspiration gave birth to her most current series of black bears.
