Photo by Alexander Berg

STATEMENT

My interdisciplinary practice is grounded in animistic principles that understand all matter as active, responsive, and interconnected. I work across drawing, painting, sculpture, language, sound, and textiles to investigate patterns and rhythms formed by invisible networks within and beyond the body—across relationships, landscapes, and physical materials. These networks carry information that shapes perception, behavior, and systems of connection between humans and the environment.

As a certified Jin Shin Jyutsu energy healer and a drummer, I integrate embodied practices of pulse listening and rhythmic patterning into my art-making. These practices inform my use of abstraction as a method for what I describe as tuning compositions—strategies that explore how internal and external systems are calibrated and perceived. Rhythm becomes both a structural and conceptual tool, linking the nervous system, landscape, and material processes.

My work encompasses a taxonomy of forms that includes Tuning Scores for the Nervous System, Charging Stations, Earth Tuning projects, and Transmission Wearables. Many of these works invite participation and collaboration. Tuning Scores for the Nervous System are visual compositions that function as performance scores, generating collaborations with musicians who interpret the rhythms and patterns embedded in the drawings. These works reference the spine as a vertical axis and the right–left polarities of the body, visualizing how information moves through the nervous system to shape thought, attitude, and action.

My Earth Tuning projects translate Jin Shin Jyutsu energy pathways onto specific landscapes, including the Hudson River and public garden sites. Using copper rods wrapped with iron wire as acupuncture-like contact points, these installations engage underground root systems and carbon-based communication networks, highlighting symbiotic relationships within ecosystems.

Alongside this work, I maintain a zero-waste project that transforms the detritus of daily life into reusable material, reflecting my commitment to material responsibility. Across all aspects of my practice, I seek to create attentive encounters between people and materials, revealing how physical substance, intention, and perception are deeply interconnected. Through this work, I aim to foster greater awareness of the subtle systems that bind body, environment, and matter.

BIO

Kathleen Anderson (born New Haven, CT) lives and works in the Hudson Valley since 1990. An interdisciplinary artist who explores interconnectivity through material sentience and information patterns through drawing, painting, sculpture, language, sound, and textile. A drummer, and certified Jin Shin Jyutsu practitioner Anderson applies physio-philosophical principles of vital materiality, pulse listening and percussive drum rhythmic patterns to her art practice.

Her work has been exhibited at numerous venues including the Bronx Museum of Art, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Oberlin College, Brown University, Dorsky Museum, SUNY, New Paltz and Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, Narrowsburg, NY. She is a dharma teacher at Catskill Zendo, a Korean Zen temple in Summitville, NY and a museum educator at Dia Beacon, a contemporary art museum in Beacon, NY.