Kate Borcherding

Who is Kate Borcherding?

Kate Borcherding is an American artist working in mixed media. Her artistic style is both neoclassical and postmodern. Her art mainly focuses on the human figure, and is often psychological in nature with narratives expressed across multiple layers.

She is currently a professor teaching printmaking: intaglio, lithography, relief, monoprint, silkscreen; book arts, life drawing, and occasionally 2D/3D at Sam Houston State University in Texas, where she has been employed since 1993.

Themes among different media echo Borcherding's interest in understanding 'what it means to be human' whereby she often explores making invisible concepts visible: people in the act of thinking, narratives wherein something is hidden or revealed, and daily cycles of life against longer cycles of geologic or celestial time. By infusing the making of the art into the art, she captures a specific ‘moment in time’ that contrasts deep rhythms and underlying forces. Her desire, conceptually parallel to different tempos of time outlined by historian Fernand Braudel, is to capture these human moments within the larger context of universal humanity.

For example, it is easy to topple the ephemeral rock cairns of the "Memory Diaries" environmental art project, while the larger landscape and annual cycles persist comparatively against the timeless celestial background. Congruently in Borcherding's "Fulcrum" sculpture the motif of the horse and rider replaces the horse with technology.