Artist Interviews 2025

Katie Murken  
By Laura Siebold


Photo credit Francis Baker

Katie Murken specifies in sculpture, collage, and installation. Her work emphasizes feminine wisdom by translating values of compassion and her understanding of relationships and life itself to the canvas. She recalls important lessons from her early art education and the opportunities that arise from women-owned galleries and inclusive organizations in the SFO Bay Area where Murken lives. In her work, the artist repurposes materials, often simple everyday items, to bring the viewer back to the roots of life – and to remind them of the elements at the core of regeneration. Read on to learn more about the symbolism behind the materials in Katie’s work and the metaphors she uses to convey her message of balance, nourishment, and connection through the transformation of what once was into what could be.


Photo credit Francis Baker

Katie, what is the message behind your multi-layered collages?

While I like to keep my work open to interpretation, I am motivated to make work that sends a message of healing. I want to show that feminine wisdom has the power to heal the many injustices we see in our world today. I have been photographing the farming landscape of the Central Valley, where a dramatic environmental crisis is unfolding. My photographs depict the destruction of the land through unsustainable farming practices, especially the exploitation of California’s water supply. To give visual emphasis to the way that the farming industry depletes the water supply, I cut out the shapes of plastic water bottles from my photographs, creating a landscape full of holes in the shape of bottles. For me, there is a parallel between the overconsumption of natural resources and the silencing of feminine wisdom in our culture - we have bottled and sold an incredible potential that is meant to flow and nourish. Feminine wisdom is not just about women, it’s about a way of relating to the world based in compassion and reciprocity - something we are all capable of. I use collage and the layering of materials as a way to infuse this message into my work. I mount my photographs on floral bed sheets to create a visual sense of regeneration and regrowth. I think that when we listen to feminine wisdom and see the interconnectedness of all life, we can begin to heal the damage that’s been done. We can tread more consciously among the tiny sprouts of life that are struggling to grow. 



Photo credit Francis Baker

Can you tell us about your early art education? Have you always wanted to become an artist?

I grew up in a suburb thirty minutes south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and when I was 16 I enrolled in my first serious art classes in the Pre-College Art Program at Carnegie Mellon University, the same school where Andy Warhol received his BFA in 1949. Each Saturday I went with two of my friends from high school and we took classes in Painting and Drawing. It was a rigorous program compared to the art I was learning at my high school and I was studying with very accomplished teachers who were also professional artists. More than anything, I was learning about seeing — how to really look at your subject and translate that seeing onto paper or canvas. Representation has never been my strength as an artist, but I think learning to look carefully at the world is something I’ve carried with me all of these years. Once I started to see the world through the eyes of an artist I never wanted to stop. I went on to study art at Penn State University, focusing on printmaking and sculpture. Shortly after, I received my MFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia which led me to become a Professor of Art at Tyler School of Art, also in Philadelphia. Through all of this, I continued to hone my ability to “see” as an artist. To me, this is about approaching life with an open mind and paying attention to what is right in front of you. You have to be willing to look without preconceived notions in order to create, and that is something I was taught in my very first art classes. 



Photo credit Francis Baker

You live in the SF Bay Area. How much has the art community in the city influenced you in your area as an artist?

I moved to the Bay Area in 2018 when I was 38 years old. It was a huge leap for my husband and me to move across the country with two very young children. I’ve grown so much in the seven years that we’ve lived here. There are so many dimensions to the art community here, and it has definitely taken a while to see where I fit in. I’ve been most inspired by the women I see thriving in the art world. There are many very strong women-owned galleries that have created a space for open dialogue around important issues facing the world today. I see female-identifying, BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists being uplifted through galleries, museums and grassroots art spaces in a way that is really exciting and hopeful. The Bay Area has inspired me to speak my truth as an artist because I’m surrounded by other artists who are doing the same. We’re all lifting each other up and it begins to create a movement. I hope to see more opportunities for female artists coming out of this huge amount of creative potential in the Bay Area. 



Photo credit Francis Baker

You transform found everyday materials into something special that reflects the strength that can be found in hope and healing. Can you go into detail about the thought process behind your work?

I’ve been working with found materials for as long as I can remember. At first, my choices were very intuitive. I liked having a starting point for my work and gravitated towards materials that felt familiar from my upbringing. I collected domestic objects and furniture from thrift stores and they came with their own visual qualities and meanings. I used these qualities as a jumping-off point for ideas about domesticity and the invisibility of women’s labor. Over time I began to see that there were deeper psychological reasons for my desire to work with found materials and the objects I was choosing reflected some of the challenges I had faced in my life. It was like the objects represented aspects of myself that had been wounded and hidden away, and I was using my art process to confront these parts of myself, and then to heal them by transforming them into art. I continue to work this way and my recent series Dust to Dust is about the feminine wisdom that has lain dormant inside me for many years. Living in a male-dominated and often patriarchal culture has resulted in the suppression of the more feminine aspects of relating to the world. Softness, beauty, slowness, compassion, and receptivity allow us to see the interconnectedness of life, and to calibrate our speech and actions accordingly. Patriarchy takes the negative aspects of masculinity, such as separation, domination, control, and productivity and uses them to uplift only certain members of society. Many women have learned to adopt these qualities as a means of self-preservation and I was definitely one of them. This project has been about recognizing the damage inflicted by patriarchal systems and mindsets and re-introducing the feminine as a means of creating balance. The materials I’m using now include shipping pallets, barbed wire, and images of plastic water bottles - materials that speak to the commodification of nature and by extension the feminine. I manipulate the materials in different ways to shift their meanings and introduce feelings of optimism and hope. This reflects the internal process I’ve been undergoing simultaneously - confronting the parts of myself that cling to harmful patriarchal mindsets, and gradually transforming them into a more positive outlook that embraces all parts of me. It’s a lot to expect that this will all come through in the work, but I do believe that intention can be communicated through material and process. I want this work to speak to the kind of transformation that needs to happen both within us and in our relationships with each other and the natural world. 



Photo credit Francis Baker

Themes of creation and life force frequently occur in your art. What interests you about those themes and how do you incorporate those ideas into your work?

I have a strong motivation to create art as a form of healing both for myself and for my audience. I think that when we heal from trauma and painful experiences, we are accessing our life force and our ability to create new ways of being in the world. In my recent work, I’ve been interested in how I can visualize this process of the life force transforming negativity into creative energy. This can be observed in nature and the cyclical processes of birth, death, and regeneration. Water is at the core of nature’s ability to heal and regenerate, and this led me to think about the way our governments and corporations have blocked the natural flow of water and redirected it to generate profit and gain for those in power. In my collages, I wanted to illustrate this power struggle and ultimately suggest that the life force of nature will always persevere. I decided to use barbed wire as a material that references separation, incarceration, and control and the ways power is used to oppress both nature and humanity. I began by working with the physical wire itself — bending it into soft, curving forms that resemble pathways of flowing water. I then used the cyanotype process, which relies on water to be developed into an image, to create two-dimensional blueprints of the wire, which I printed on vintage floral fabrics. I’ve used this visual theme of the meandering wire throughout all of my recent pieces, and it serves to create a line of connection that flows in and out of the work. I love the way it shows the transformation of something rigid and threatening into something soft and inviting. There’s a lot of power in that. 



Photo credit Francis Baker

How do different materials like wood, acrylic, paper, dirt, and fabric come together in your work? What does repurposing materials mean for you?

I prefer to use materials that have a close connection to nature. Paper, in particular, carries a lot of meaning for me. I love the way that paper accepts materials; it is highly receptive. Receptivity is a feminine quality that opens the way for creativity. In order to create we have to be open to the full spectrum of our experience. Paper is like that, it receives materials very willingly. I frequently use watered down acrylic paint to create watery marks on the paper. This is actually a method I learned when working in art conservation, specifically with historic documents printed on paper. You can put layers of acrylic wash on paper and transform it into all kinds of surfaces. I find this very satisfying as the paper becomes one of many elements being transformed. I also do a lot with digital printing on paper. I print my photographs on different papers, and they become another surface I can manipulate in response to the developing image.

I’ve worked in collage for many years and with my new project I wanted to work at a larger more sculptural scale to give more physical presence to my work. I had the idea to use wooden shipping pallets as the support for the work because they are cast off from consumer culture in large quantities. The pallets reference all that lies behind our commodity culture — the natural resources, the human labor, and of course our bodies themselves. I thought of the pallets as a physical body with an exterior and an interior and my collages are like the skin stretched over it. To create the feeling of skin I used fabric stretched in a similar way to painter’s canvas. I sourced my fabric from thrift stores and found that vintage floral bed sheets had patterning with the nostalgic kind of beauty I was looking for. They spoke of idealized femininity and the ways that women have been locked into prescribed roles and modes of being. On the other hand, the flowers themselves offer a feeling of hope and optimism. I liked the tension this material offers. I also started incorporating dirt as a way to manipulate the surface of my images. By bringing in the physical material seen in some of the photographs I wanted to give the collages a feeling of decay and to reference the soil as another element necessary for life. I hope these diverse materials come together to create an overall message of regeneration. While some of the materials and images may be difficult to look at, I combine them with the intention of creating a harmonious whole, showing the possibility of reconciling the damage we have inflicted on the environment. 




You’ve exhibited at fairs and galleries in the US. When was the first time you publicly showed your art and what has changed since then?

My first public exhibition was in my junior year of college. I had the opportunity to show my work in the lobby of the arts administration office at Penn State. A lot of students exhibited there, and I was really excited to show a thematically connected group of works for the first time. It’s cool thinking about that first show because I’ve returned to the same subject matter in my recent work, 25 years later. Penn State is a land-grant university, and agriculture is really big there. My work for the show was about the rural landscape, farming, and decay. I noticed all the ways we manipulate the land through extraction and fragmentation. The grain silos in particular fascinated me for their phallic monumentality; they just screamed of male domination of nature. I can see now that I had an impulse to deal with these themes because I saw them as a metaphor for the ways that women are manipulated through domesticity - something that I had witnessed in my childhood through the struggles of my mother and grandmothers. 




In what ways can art offer transformation and healing? Elaborate.

I think art acts as a mirror to our experiences. Using form, space, and color we can create objects and images that reflect our innermost feelings and desires and the way these are projected in the outer world. This becomes a healing experience when we see a work of art that resonates with something we have been through or are going through at that moment. We feel seen and validated and that gives us the strength to persevere. The art might even point to something we can do to heal - something we need to make, or change, or a conversation we need to have. I experienced this kind of transformation and healing when I first encountered the quilts of Gee’s Bend. When I was a young child, quilts were the closest thing to fine art that I was exposed to. My mother made quilts from a collection of fabrics saved and gathered over the years. After years of studying art, I learned about the stunning quilts made in Gee’s Bend, Alabama by women who had no formal art training. I was blown away by the sophistication and joyful energy of the designs - they were completely unlike anything I had seen before. One quilt, in particular, stood out to me because it was made from old denim work clothes that the quilter’s husband had worn to work on a farm. These were men and women descended from slaves, and the work clothes bore the residue of the oppression and abuse they endured. Yet the quilter was able to transform them into something beautiful and empowering, a deep blue sky of open possibilities. Encountering this quilt was healing on several levels. It showed me the importance of my own mother’s quilts in her journey through motherhood and the isolation she had experienced. It affirmed that I had, in fact, been exposed to a valuable art form as a young person. It also inspired me to continue my own work with found materials and gave me conviction of their healing power. 




What are three things that are special about the art community in San Francisco?

The San Francisco arts community is special for its inclusivity - I see this in the organizations that support artists with disabilities like NIAD and Creative Growth; in the diverse institutions focused on underrepresented groups like the Museum of the African Diaspora and Asian Art Museum; and, also, in the way artists organize and support one another. There are so many different communities within the larger art world here and it creates a feeling that there is room for everyone. I was really excited to find a group of mother artists called WOW MOMS who host monthly critiques for participating artists. They’ve been so welcoming, and I’ve really benefited from spending time with this talented group of women who are going through similar experiences to my own. 



Photo credit Francis Baker

Can you share some advice for novice artists to broaden the reception of their work? What are your aspirations for the future?

I’ve learned a lot from my experience of moving to a new city and knowing very few people in the art world here. My top advice to novice artists would be to go to art openings and art events and talk to people. Connecting in-person with gallerists, fellow artists, and cultural workers is the best way to create an audience for your work. It might be nerve-wracking at first, but the more you do it the more comfortable you’ll feel. Don’t be afraid to tell people that you're an artist and be prepared with a few sentences about your work. From these conversations, you will start to get a sense of where your work fits and the kind of opportunities that make sense for you. Artists are the heart and soul of the art world and the whole thing depends on us and our work. Don’t underestimate the value of your work and use this mindset to seek out opportunities that align with your message.

I continue to work towards broadening my audience. I aspire to show my work internationally and to make an impact on how motherhood is perceived and experienced worldwide. I did a residency in Venice, Italy when I was 22 years old and since then I’ve dreamed of having my work included in the Biennale di Venezia. It never hurts to dream big!