Katie Holten: Paths of Desire

by Katie Holten (Artist), Paul Ha (Foreword), Elizabeth Kolbert (Contributor)

In her first museum exhibition in the United States, Irish artist Katie Holten joins the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, as an artist-in-residence to create her largest and most ambitious work to date. The exhibition presents a new site-specific indoor installation comprised of sculpture, drawings and paintings and an outdoor performance that collectively explore global ecology and social gestures within moments of environmental crisis. Interested in our fragile ecology from an international perspective--while also considering local concerns--Holten's work is a relative, aesthetic proposition for community-friendly solutions. She renders nature essential, and in the process asks individuals and communities to ponder their natural environment, and to consider human fragility in an uncertain future. Holten collaborates with communities around the globe to raise awareness of environmental issues through a visual consideration of nature. Her exhibitions heighten a sense of urgency and action through beautifully rendered work that expresses the fragile ecology of local environments.

120 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2007

About the author

Katie Holten is an artist, activist and bestselling author. Her book The Language of Trees was published in 2023.

In 2003, she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Nevada Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

Her work investigates the entangled relationships between humans and the natural world. She has created Tree Alphabets, a Stone Alphabet, and a Wildflower Alphabet to share the joy she finds in her love of the more-than-human world.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and frieze. She is a visiting lecturer at the New School of the Anthropocene. If she could be a tree, she would be an Oak.