Katherine Gemperline holds an MFA in Curatorial Studies from the University of Kentucky and dual BAs in Studio Art with a concentration in Painting and Drawing and Computer Science from Xavier University. She has been at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts as the Kenneth R. Trapp Craft Assistant / Curatorial Fellow since July 2025. She has worked as an artist, a curator, a programmer, and a quality assurance specialist, among many other jobs.
Currently, she focuses her time primarily as a curator, with her artistic practice as an important part of her personal time. Below are her Curatorial and Artist Statements.
katherinegemperline@gmail.com
(502) 594-8607
Curatorial Practice
Katherine Gemperline holds an MFA in Curatorial Studies from the University of Kentucky and dual BAs in Studio Art with a concentration in Painting and Drawing and Computer Science from Xavier University. She has been at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts as the Kenneth R. Trapp Craft Assistant / Curatorial Fellow since July 2025.
Her curatorial practice invites audiences to question aesthetic norms and their deeper cultural implications. Her current professional work focuses on the aesthetics of craft and art in the Appalachian regions, as the market shifted from functional craft to market-driven design and contemporary practices, where traditional techniques support artistic expression.
Her past work has focused on how different cultures express beauty standards, especially through the grotesque and its ties to moral “rightness.” She curated Beyond Grotesque and Disordered Creatures, exhibitions that explore the grotesque body, abjection, mental and physical health, and the destabilization of gender norms. Katherine’s approach bridges critical theory, visual culture, and artistic practice to interrogate the intersection of beauty and ethics.
Artistic Practice
Katherine Gemperline holds an MFA in Curatorial Studies from the University of Kentucky and dual BAs in Studio Art (Painting and Drawing) and Computer Science from Xavier University. She has been the Kenneth R. Trapp Craft Assistant / Curatorial Fellow at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts since July 2025.
Gemperline’s current practice examines the intersection of meditation, escapism, and dissociation within the context of contemporary socio-political instability. In an environment shaped by persistent anxiety and informational, sometimes fraudulent, overload, her work emerges from an ongoing negotiation between the necessity of remaining informed and the psychological toll of sustained attention. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, she has sought material and process-based strategies that create space for both withdrawal and reflection.
Departing from her earlier focus on painting and drawing, Gemperline employs beadwork as a durational and repetitive practice. The meticulous act of stringing individual beads becomes a form of meditation, allowing for a mental state in which thoughts drift, fragment, and reassemble.
The resulting works take the form of mundane, everyday objects, reconstructed through an accumulation of labor. Their apparent normality stands in tension with the excessive time required to produce them, creating a quiet absurdity that calls attention to value, attention, and purpose. This juxtaposition prompts viewers to question not only the object's function but also the systems of meaning and labor through which value is assigned.
While essentially functionless, Gemperline’s finished sculptures are meant to be more than just objects to view. Viewers are invited to interact physically with the objects, as simple as a touch to feel the texture of the beads or tossing them back and forth from hand to hand to feel the weight. This sensory experience further draws the viewer to the minute details of what they are experiencing.
Her practice draws inspiration from artists such as Liza Lou and Carly Owens Weiss, whose materially intensive processes similarly interrogate labor, perception, and the aesthetics of the everyday.