Katie Marie Bruce
Katie Marie Bruce
Website: katiemariebruce.com
Instagram: @kmb_artist
Bio: Katie Marie Bruce is an artist and educator based in Lethbridge Alberta Canada. She received an MFA with a focus in Print Media from York University in 2015, where her thesis work examining empathy was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her practice is currently engaged with intersections of touch, empathy and the affected/affective body, based materially in a print-media dialogue. She has presented and exhibited across North America.
Artist Statement: A deity produces in me a swelling of sensations: knots form in stomach throat tongue thoughts swarm and fixate with little ability to control the choreography flesh gets flus shivers overtake fingers tap pick scratch freeze feet and legs thump involuntarily break gets shallow teeth bite cheeks the internal dialogue is unkind. I wake up at 1am and then again at 3. When I am lucky, I notice it starting and attempt to calm it. When I am unlucky, this overload goes unchecked until my bottom lip is raw from micro bites. Most of this remains unseen by others.
For sometime now, my work has made a point of displaying the emotions that are frequently tucked behind closed doors. Exhausting, anxiety, grieving, healing — each with their own series of unique, internal sensations — are pieces of the human experience that we rarely put on full display. An unfeeling world does not negate feeling; it amplifies it for those deemed vulnerable. Those who, by contrast to their steric counterparts, are constantly renegotiating how, and often who, we will be.
These self-portraits are a mediation between the desire to be seen in full, nuanced humanity and an equally powerful desire to be left alone with these uncomfortable feelings. To make images in this vein is to tease apart messy moments as if searching for the base tangle, while also recognizing the permanent emotional creases left by each knot undone. The resulting pieces ask only of the viewer to consider moments of self within the portraits of an other.