Kate Knudsen

Kate Knudsen Description

Kate Knudsen is a painter and sculptor living in Sonoma, California. But her art is informed by a childhood lived deep in the American South. Her paintings are populated by young women and children often dressed in their Sunday best – no coincidence that Kate grew up in her mom and dad’s main street children’s clothing store.

In the work, childhood parties are crashed by the artist’s own subconscious. Religious iconography gives pause more than salvation. Empty white gowns, disembodied dolls, blindfolds, and the occasional curious lamb point to the core of Knudsen’s work: raw memory, pre-therapy. 

Kate is the daughter of a Lebanese Antiochian Orthodox Christian father and a Texas-born Southern Baptist mother who landed in Vicksburg, MS. She grew up playing on Confederate battlefields and wandering through tombstones in military cemeteries. 

“You know, I left the South for California but am forever dragging stuff home: pickets, rusted metal parts, religious artifacts, doll heads and other remnants that remind me of that childhood place.” 

Beyond a country mailbox, her childhood place is a slightly haunted state of pure wonder.