While Kitchener’s Kat Hernden didn’t consider herself a multimedia artist until adulthood, it doesn’t mean she stopped creating it every chance she got.
The Grade 7 teacher-turned-artist found comfort in the structure and order geometry offers and started to paint patterns again after she hit a creative block after her kids matured. But it wasn’t until she began hand-stitching canvas, following basic sketches of common patterns and shapes around the K-W region, did she feel like herself again.
“Geometry came out of necessity because I can’t draw, I can’t do realism at all, it’s like a Neanderthal did it,” laughed Hernden. “Adding the thread opened up a whole new world for me and then just exploring that in my art is like, it feels like it’s like an endless excitingly endless pursuit.”
The Rotunda Gallery display is several years in the making, after Hernden’s initial exhibition was delayed by the pandemic. While the pieces attracted an audience on Instagram, the artist is excited to finally put her work on display.
“I made a lot of this work during the pandemic and I think it just made everybody slow down and recognize maybe more of the stuff that’s all around because the world got so much smaller you know,” said Hernden. “So instead of like looking externally for entertainment and interesting things, you had to kind of look a lot closer to home.”
Her exhibit, In Plain Sight, was inspired by traditional patterns that are obvious in everyday architecture and put them on display. In Plain Sight was almost called ‘This is good too, right?’ which recognized the conspicuous nature of the patterns Hernden chose and the differences between North American and European streetscapes.
“When you go to Europe, there’s all these beautiful mosaics and patterns, and they’re obvious, but I was like, ‘look, we’ve got all these like cool things here too that we’re just walking past all the time,’” Hernden said. “It’s sort of like you know, (the patterns are) there, you can see it, but we walk past it and kind of don’t notice them as often.”
One of her favourite pieces is based on a convenience store on King Street East and the cinder block pattern above it. This piece represents a time when Hernden started getting a deeper dive into the more hidden patterns around the K-W.
“Kitchener especially gets a bad reputation for (being a concrete jungle),” said Hernden, who lives in East Kitchener. “Having lived in Waterloo and moving here, all of our Waterloo friends were like, ‘What are you doing?’ So I also like celebrating the fact that it is beautiful in its own way.”
Plain Sight will be on display at the Rotunda Gallery during September and October.
