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Kat O’Connor: Swimming the Jewel
July 23 @ 10:00 am - October 31 @ 4:00 pm
Free – $10
Highfield Hall & Gardens presents Kat O’Connor: Swimming the Jewel July 23 through October 31, 2024.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10 AM to 4 PM, and Saturday and Sunday, 10 AM to 2 PM.
In this solo exhibition, artist Kat O’Connor brings her poetic and sublime paintings of water and human connection to water to Highfield Hall. In Swimming the Jewel, O’Connor paints the subject that has been her muse for over a decade, capturing water and light and sometimes the movement of figures in water to create a seemingly new world of the senses. O’Connor works in watercolor, acrylic, and oil, with subject matter reflecting what is important in her life, travel, horses, and swimming. Her portfolio contains grid-like and nature-based abstraction, horse studies, bodies of water, city and landscapes capturing her focus on light and pattern.
O’Connor’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the United States. She is a Copley Master with the Copley Society of Artists and was honored with a Co/So Fellowship and Residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Massachusetts in 2023 and was a 2021 Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts Resident. She was awarded a Mass Cultural Council Fellowship for her drawings and two ArtsWorcester Material Needs Grants. After winning the Sally R. Bishop Best in Show Prize at the 2021 ArtsWorcester Biennial, she displayed a solo exhibition, Fathom: The Art of Kat O’Connor, at the Worcester Art Museum. She has also led painting classes in Texas, New Mexico, Italy, Greece, and throughout New England.
In describing her creative approach, O’Connor says she seeks to explore the way realism can push into and through abstraction. “My paintings capture what happens in a split second of weightlessness, a momentary realism in which rip currents tear away at the abyss and produce images and shapes that were once imperceptible.” This is evident when the artist incorporates ethereal celestial light and weightlessness into portraits.
Kat O’Connor is a full-time artist and art instructor living outside of Boston, Massachusetts, and her work can be viewed at katopaints.com and @katopaints.