Kat Michael

Artist Statement

My obsession with the human figure and portraiture has been clear ever since I was a
child, and it has only grown over the years. My early bodies of work include many faces, beings,
characters and creatures as I began exploring and developing my skill set. I have since moved on
from simple life-drawings to more conceptual work developing characters and personalities. In
doing so I have come to understand it was not just the physical form that intrigued me, but a
persons story, thoughts, and feelings.
I am inspired mostly by characters from films, video games, and novels. My process often
involves taking these individuals from their usual settings and juxtaposing them with new and
seemingly unfit environments. I often create faceless versions of these characters or have
something blocking parts of their faces in order slant their identities into a more general and
ambiguous direction.
I am currently building on the concept of fragmented personalities. The idea is to
demonstrate the way a persons experiences can either widen or narrow their perceptions of
reality through visually distorting the individuals face, body, or surroundings. By
misrepresenting or altering the anatomy of these individuals, or covering their faces with masks,
I aim to project their inner altered or damaged states and their desires to hide them.

In the

future I will be investigating the same principles in a new way by separating and dividing the
figure and its features through exploration of sculpture. I will develop this with the intention of
making viewers further reflect on the effects left behind of life events. I intend to expand this
idea to cover the ways memory can affect mental state as well as how we can develop false
memories.