Kathryn Fullerton is a Canadian Fine Artist searching for an understanding of the past and memory, of experience and consciousness, by investigating her complex relationship with place. She gathers wild clay and practices presence through a moment-to-moment conversation between material and hands. The act of making is an embodied process deeply informed by her lived experience and evolves through repetition, experimentation, and close attention to what emerges in her hands. Sculptures are sawdust or wood fired, allowing another kind of expertise (fire, smoke, air, ash) to take over once the form is complete.
GROUNDSPRING
GIBSONS PUBLIC ART GALLERY, 2027
The vision for this exhibition emerged from a period of unforeseen vulnerability during my residency at Joya: Arte + Ecología in Spain. It was further shaped by a dream evoking the fortitude and resilience we draw upon in times of difficulty. My understanding of Groundspring as a metaphor for fracture and regeneration deepened after observing how geological faulting gave rise to a plentitude of mineral and medicinal springs in Castelo de Vide, Portugal, where I stayed for an extended time following my residency. Weakened and curious, I spent my days visiting these restorative waters. Soon after returning home, confronted by a sudden and tragic loss, I began forming vessels inspired by the spring as a source of renewal.
THE QUIET BETWEEN
FERRY BUILDING GALLERY, 2026
The seed for this exhibition came from my recent residency at Tidal Art Center, 2024. I started by following my instinct to repeatedly make hollow spheres with clay. The spheres began to take on lives of their own; containers that held the sacredness of life, reverence for life, generative in nature. After some time, the spheres burst open, revealing a generative pulse/thrum/quaking felt in the belly of my being.
MEETING AT THE WATERING HOLE
JOYA ART + ECOLOGIA / AIR, 2025
Watering Holes are places of spiritual and physical sustenance, life giving, significant meeting places and ceremonial sites. I sojourned to the Parque Natural Sierra María in the Iberian peninsula ~ an arid zone, at the eastern end of the Cordillera Subbética, struggling against the combined forces of climate change, global markets and land degradation to listen deeply to the land and collaborate with other artists and land materials.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
for realizing Meeting at the Watering Hole Project at Joya AIR, Spain, 2025.
COMRAICHE
TIDAL ARTS CENTRE / AIR, 2024
When I began my residency at Tidal Arts Centre I made a list of my ancestors, dating back to their homelands in Scotland and Ireland, and invited them on this journey with me. I felt their presence with me as well as a pull to go to visit the land where they come from. Through my time here I learned the Scottish Gaelic name for the area of Applecross, a small town near the Hebrides where my maternal great grandparents are from, is A’ Chomraich, which means The Sanctuary. I have a yearning to learn more about this area, which is not easy to get to and feels very much at the edge of the world. Tidal Arts Centre feels like a Sanctuary (Comraiche) at the edge of the world ~ not in connection with the church or other sacred place where a refugee was immune from arrest (as it often was in Scotland), but from the Latin sanctuarium, a container for keeping something in.
GIVING AS A WAY OF BEING: A CEREMONIAL PRACTICE EXPLORING LIFE AND LOSS
QATHET ART CENTRE, 2024
Perhaps it is in the sacred act of letting go that creates an opening to the process of life as a giving…it’s not the act of giving or what we give that makes the difference, i'ts that we open ourselves up to giving as a way of being. I began each day making a tiny earthenware offering vessel from materials of this place, filling its belly with nourishing food and giving the food as a daily offering to the ocean… just begin with the intention, and act, of giving daily to the ocean waters and see what happens. The daily ritual became an invocation of sorts that opened a way of engaging more deeply with my inner world and the spirit of place.
GROUP EXHIBITION
QATHET (POWELL RIVER)
LIVING IN THE BONE HOUSE
WABISAVILLAGE / AIR, 2023
This project is part of a bigger arc of work initiated in 2022 when I spent two months in Atlantic Canada, on the land where my settler ancestors lived and died, visiting graves, homesteads, doing extensive archival and genealogical research and delving into personal explorations around decolonization. When I came home I started working with clay in new ways. I moved away from making vessels and started sculpting forms. I began to see something original emerge in my work with clay and the forms sparked an inquiry into bones and living in the bone house, which is derived from an Anglo-Saxon kenning [Ban-hus / banhus] signifying the body. I continued this work in Japan where my sculptures were fired in Shozo Michikawa’s Hotarugama kiln (during a typhoon)!
JAPAN
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
for realizing Living in the Bone House Project at Wabisavillage, Japan, 2023.