Creative Methodology
My paintings and drawings, on oil, acrylic or natural pigments, are mainly introspective self-portraits that I would like to see as an autobiographic poetry. Exploring natural elements that I encounter in my day to day environment. My research has two axes, the mountains of my hometown in La Paz, Bolivia, and a tree I found in my current life in Paris, France, with which I weave a relationship. I paint from real encounters with these natural elements, or from photographs of these elements taken by close friends.Through my paintings I try to display into images the poetry of the life of the tree with which I weave this relationship and how my life is linked to the tree. The notion of intimacy is very important in my paintings.
I look to translate this link that unites me to the tree and the mountains and materialize the sensations of this relationships that I’m building. These ideas are often displayed in compositions that reach the edges of my paintings. Depicted in large formats, I’m trying to express things that written or spoken language won’t allow me to say. I’m looking for a symbolic, almost spiritual dimension of painting, like religious icons of mountains and trees.
BIO
Born in 1993 in La Paz, Bolivia, Kate Araoz lives in Paris, France, where she develops her practice. Her main creative means are painting and drawing. She first graduated in sociology and anthropology from the University of Rennes 2 in France, as well as a master’s degree in plastic arts with a mention in contemporary art from the Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University. She expresses herself through visual gestures that align with the internalisation of elements in nature. The two great constituent elements of her work are the mountain and the tree, as living subjects.
In her work she mainly explores concepts linked to her environment. Many come from the mountainous landscape of the Cordillera de Los Andes and the Amazon forest within her native Bolivia. As well as her current life, in a city where nature emerges as spots on an urban landscape.
Her explorations and studies, are almost always displayed on linen or recycled paper. They are a journey towards the vegetal and organic. She evokes resonances with ecology, animism or spirituality. Born from the experience of direct contact, this work explores the possible links that a human could weave with, for instance, a tree. From drawing and painting, a poetry depicted into images. It is an observation of transformation at the heart of matter.