Kat Collins Bio
Kat Collins (b. 1977) is an abstract painter based in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, whose work explores emotional weather, sensory memory, and the layered terrains of internal experience. Working primarily in mixed media, Collins builds her paintings through intuitive gesture, atmospheric color fields, and cycles of layering and revision that create depth, tension, and a sense of quiet resonance. Her practice investigates the spaces where feeling becomes form—where the unseen movements beneath the surface of daily life gather, shift, and emerge.
Collins earned her BFA from Mount Vernon Nazarene University in 2000 and has since developed a distinctive visual language rooted in intuition, mark-making, and embodied emotional perception. She works across canvas, paper, and wood panel, incorporating materials such as acrylic, ink, graphite, collage, charcoal, and oil pastel to create paintings that function as internal landscapes.
Her work has been exhibited in galleries and arts institutions across the United States, including the Allentown Art Museum, the Ronald K. De Long Gallery, Connexions Gallery, the David E. Rodale and Rodale Family Galleries, The Boyer Gallery, Midnight Gallery, NoName Gallery, and the Sigal Museum, as well as venues in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. Her paintings are held in private collections nationwide and have been featured in contemporary art publications.
Collins continues to expand her practice through new large-scale bodies of work, installation projects, and a forthcoming series inspired by Walt Whitman’s assertion, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Artist Statement
I paint what can’t be seen—emotional weather, sensory memory, and the quiet terrains that move beneath the surface of our lives. My work begins with instinctive, unguarded marks and evolves through layered movement, atmospheric color, and cycles of excavation, obscuring, and re-emergence. I follow the felt sense of a moment—its storm, its suspension, its tension—until the painting finds its own internal logic, revealing what wants to surface and what needs to dissolve.
My current body of work is a developing series inspired by Walt Whitman’s I am large, I contain multitudes, exploring multiplicity, internal scale, and selfhood as a shifting landscape rather than a fixed state. These paintings often unfold across expansive, asymmetrical formats, including diptychs and triptychs, where activated seams, gravity-driven drips, and raw mark-making suggest movement, descent, and psychological weather systems. I prioritize restraint, visible process, and unresolved tension, allowing the work to remain open and alive rather than resolved or illustrative.
Rooted in intuition and embodied experience, my practice investigates the space where feeling becomes form. Each painting creates an abstract environment shaped by internal terrain—its fractures, accumulations, disruptions, and shifts. Through gesture, revision, and the interplay between what is hidden and what is revealed, the work holds traces of energy, memory, rupture, and restoration.
I aim to build paintings that offer a place to slow down and feel: spacious environments where viewers can recognize something quietly true within themselves. Each piece holds a record of becoming—a moment of presence where emotional weather and internal terrain converge.