Kathryn Fullerton explores and responds to emergent questions arising from lived experience. Clay, with its earthy, tactile nature, invites her to follow quiet impulses through deep embodied listening. Forms that emerge from this process are not fixed or predetermined; rather, they are shaped by intuition, reflection, and an ongoing dialogue between hands and earth, often yielding surprising phenomena. Imagery that emerges through this work, while rooted in the spirit of our times, feels as ancient as the clay itself and offers insights into how to live in a world that is in a steady and constant state of change.
The Comraiche series emerged while Kathryn was deeply immersed in an art residency at Tidal Art Centre on the unceded lands and waters of the Tla’amin Nation, BC. (2024). During the residency she learned the Scottish Gaelic name for the area of Applecross, a small town near the Hebrides where her maternal great grandparents are from, is A’ Chomraich, which means ‘The Sanctuary’. The work was a response to her curiosity about allurement, as a principle that attracts and pulls us into our evolutionary flow of existence, as opposed to addiction, which evokes feelings of emptiness and pushes us forward by means of pain. Her intention was to feel more into the kind of aliveness that is not matched by anything else, which comes from the experience of creating beauty that didn’t exist before in the universe, that adds to the universe, that is uniquely hers to create. A selection of these works will be part of a group show at the Ferry Building Gallery, North Vancouver, BC in April 2026.
Kathryn received her MA in Environmental Education and Communication in 2009 and was a Governor General’s Gold Award nominee based on her arts based thesis. When she moved to Indonesia for five months in 2016 she stumbled across Gaya Ceramic Arts Center and ended up staying two years! Clay became the medium that awakened memories from childhood and it is from this ground/earth where her art practice emerges alongside training in Embodied Imagination™, which is a creative and therapeutic way of working with dreams. Kathryn has exhibited at the Sunshine Coast Art Crawl for four consecutive years and is grateful to live on the unceded lands and waters of the Shíshálh Nation on the Sunshine Coast.