Come raise a glass as we toast to the opening of Watersheds featuring the textile work of Kathryn Frund. This exhibition will be on view from September 12th to October 26, 2025
Located in The Workshop Gallery, Building 3.
Opening Reception on Friday, September 12th from 4-7 pm
Regular Gallery Hours from 12-4 pm on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
Artist Statement:
Watersheds, composed of fiber installations, sculptures, and mixed media works on panel, addresses the exponentially expanding amounts of synthetic materials entering the world's landfills and oceans. Animated and graphic in nature, the work employs synthetic fast fashion, diverted from the consumer waste stream.
Contours and Rising Tides, a 36-foot-long nautical map of Long Island Sound, is often perceived as a landform. In actuality, it is a depiction of the body of water separating Connecticut from Long Island.* Our common inability to define the contours of oceans, perceiving land as a positive and water as a void, is explored here.
The collection of found garments, sourced from thrift centers, is transformed from discarded clothing into a form of spiritual dance. This process-driven work transforms the waste, fostering a dialogue about reuse, repurposing, and reimagining a society that, through empowerment, overcomes hyper-consumerism. It envisions a community that acts as a force for change and awareness. Our collective presence can inspire a spiritual reawakening, encouraging us to move beyond our reliance on synthetic materials toward a healing interdependence—one that transforms our relationship with the natural world. Funded by a CT Sea Grant in 2020.
The Sand Bag and Shifter-Shapes series were an artistic response to the threat of rising coastal tides.
Bio-Shift-Shapes are altered garments that have the potential to function as sandbags, with the added ability to transform back to their original purpose. The inspiration for this series is based on the premise that the ability to provide multiple functions can divert objects from the consumer waste stream.
These objects present hypothetical images of biodegradable fashion where a silk ruffle, suggestive of fungi and organic decay, replaces non-degradable, petroleum-based clothing. Several climate-focused groups have organically formed in my town of Cheshire, CT. Drawing attention to these collective voices, this series of work acknowledges their protective and proactive mission.
Although this work cannot biodegrade, they do present visions of the organic underpinnings of life and the desire for synthetic objects to conform to natural processes.
These fiber works were a response to the writings of Janine Benyus, a biologist and author who popularized biomimicry in her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. She introduced a discipline that mimics nature's designs—like solar cells inspired by leaves—to create sustainable solutions.
About the Artist
Kathryn Frund is a mixed-media artist working across fiber, painting, sculpture, and installation. Her art explores themes of stewardship, damage, fluidity, and control, posing questions about the complex relationships between nature and humanity. She is interested in the intersections of the material and spiritual, the altered and recombined, addressing the notions of transcendence and restitution.
She has participated in residencies at MacDowell Colony, Newport Art Museum, Dune Shack at Cape Cod National Seashore, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and was a recipient of a CT Sea Grant from the University of Connecticut in 2020.
Frund holds a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. She lives in Cheshire and works in New Haven, CT. Her work has been exhibited at the Hudson River Museum, Art in Embassies Program in Nicosia, Cyprus, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, S. Korea, Hudson River Museum, Real Art Ways, Katonah Museum of Art, and Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art.