The Grace Museum Exhibition - Kate Breakey: Journey

For this exhibition, ‘Journey’, Kate Breakey draws from several bodies of work made over a several decades of image making. Breakey has always altered her photographic images. Over her 40 year career, her techniques include hand coloring – laying the surface with pencil, oil paint or pastel, gilding images on glass (orotones) encaustic wax, and embroidering on silk, which she attributes too her early art school training in printmaking and painting.

Artwork featured in the exhibition range in size and media and subject matter and take us on a journey of her various obsessions that includes astronomical images, skies, clouds, oceans, trees, nests, shells, flowers and animals. This exhibition includes new work created especially for Grace Museum and is curated to be a circular visual poem with each individual image leading to the next. Corresponding text will relate a short story, explaining time and place in the continuum of the artists oeuvre. The collection of images in the gallery can be viewed as a shrine to Breakey’s reverence for the beauty and wonder and diversity of the natural world. Breakey is best known for her work Small Deaths memorializing hundreds of dead birds, but has more recently made large series of bird’s nests and quail eggs. Her interest in the natural world extends outward to include grass and seaweed, tumbleweeds, and beach stones. Fascinated by the shapes, colors and textures, the scale.