Kathryn Frund
Joyful Goals
2025

My work examines our tenuous connections to the environment and the expanding amounts of artificial matter in our daily lives. As a result, this exploration brings awareness to the themes of stewardship, fluidity, excess, and integration.

I incorporate post-consumer matter in my installations, mixed media paintings, and fiber pieces, serving simultaneously as muse and art material. My work embraces the spontaneity of readymade, found post-consumer items in varying states of material collapse. As co-author with the consumer waste stream, I seek to remake, remark, and reexamine the relationship of material goods with the natural world by cutting, altering, and reconfiguring synthetic garments, my preferred medium, into new configurations. I focus on synthetic clothing, the product of fast fashion, and the petroleum industry.This work addresses fragmentation and fluidity by employing the act of cutting, deconstructing, and reassembling. Preferring graphic stripes and a limited color palette, these altered, stretched, and contorted fiber fragments morph into room-size nautical maps, which address the “void between landforms, the unidentifiable contours of the world oceans.

Inspired by DADA, Abstract Expressionism, and Feminist Art, my sculptures and installations generate dialogue around sustainable practices and human connectivity. My work explores the dichotomies of consumption and sustainability, rigidity and flow, moderation, and excessiveness. I am interested in the intersection of the material and spiritual, the altered and recombined, addressing the notions of transcendence and restitution.