KAT CHAPMAN
Kat Chapman is a multidisciplinary painter based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She is interested in the impulse humans seem to share that incites imaginative storytelling. To put it plainly, Kat has found a lot about the world to be pretty bleak. Her subconscious is most often filled with a scattering of mythological references, folklore, animal motifs, and the influence of hand-drawn animation styles from her youth. Enraptured by the natural world, most of her work centers around plant and animal life as stand-ins for the human experience. It is in these things that she finds the most beauty and magic. This hodgepodge of influences merge to form their own unique visual storytelling in her pieces.
Kat's work pulls from these inspirations which are encoded in aesthetic traditions of veneration, iconography, and sacred ornamentation, in order to relay values. Her work aims to communicate a more playful and serious message of celebration. Inventive color and fairytale-like scenes invite viewers
to indulge in a different reality, one where women can live in snail shells, or dogs and horses emote through a circus commentary on performative tendency.
She explores personal mythmaking through this lens of tension between presence and distance. In search of whimsy, Kat is most often asking herself how to change the way a story can be told. Her roots in traditions of portraiture, decorative art, fashion illustration, and ornamental design aid an innate draw to make things beautiful shapes. With recent representation by the Lancaster Art Vault, Kat is deepening her roots in Lancaster City’s vibrant creative community, while continuing to expand her practice.
