Kathleen King

Lives and works in Berkeley, CA, USA

Artist statement

The title of my 2025 solo exhibition ASSISTED LIVING is a bit of irony about being old and making art. It represents thinking about how generative the personal, social, and political matrix is, as we see it through the lens of everyday life. I turned 69 years old in June. It’s weird being old. People don’t talk about it much and I don’t think I would have listened to anything anyone said when I was younger anyway. You just must live it. I’m realizing that the rest of my life will be about staying with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth. The work is to experiment with the informal capacities of difference, to develop the kind of thinking that would provide the means to build more livable futures. Like an old person, our world crazily thinks there is still time. I keep thinking about Fred Moten’s questions: what do we not have that we need, what do we want or want to get… what do we have that we want to keep? So, how do we assist each other to live? By means of friendship, conversation, creativity, showing up, support, solidarity, labor, intersections, listening, intimacy, physical and spiritual touch, holding space and holding each other. The work in this show analyzes habits and impasses, experimenting with multi-layered and multidirectional lines of flight through the practice of gleaning and arranging objects. Finding objects and sorting through inventories I think about things, but also about ways of being, ways of living, attitudes and...

Artwork