Kate Register’s multidisciplinary practice engages with material instability, provisional form, and the generative possibilities of process across painting, décollage, and fiber-based media. Her work examines how formal elements—color, shape, and line—function as responsive, communicative systems that guide the development of each composition. Rather than serving representational or symbolic functions, these elements assert their own agency: they interrupt, reorient, and cohere, activating the surface as a site of visual negotiation.
Register’s large-scale paintings on raw canvas are constructed through open-ended, improvisational procedures that privilege intuition and spatial responsiveness. These works resist compositional finality, emerging instead through iterative layers of pigment, linear gesture, and shifting form. The absence of premeditated structure allows for a relational field to develop—one in which visual relationships are in constant negotiation. Evocative of spatial atmospheres or fragmented figuration, these paintings operate at the threshold between abstraction and perceptual suggestion.
Her décollages on wood adopt a more materially aggressive methodology. Composed with layered street posters sourced from the urban environment—primarily NYC—they are subjected to acts of abrasion, electrical sanding, and additive reworking. This process produces ruptured, sedimented surfaces that foreground the entropic nature of the image. Register exploits these disruptions to construct visual rhythms that simultaneously undermine and stabilize the composition. Within this dialectic, beauty emerges not as a fixed aesthetic category, but as a condition produced through tension: between refinement and rupture, permanence and decay.
Her fiber-based works extend this visual language through a materially distinct, but compositionally fluid format. Created through deliberate placement and built color relationships, these framed works unfold with the same sense of rhythm and movement found in her paintings and décollages. Without materially manipulating the medium, Register allows line, shape, and chromatic interaction to generate momentum across the surface. These works embody restraint and clarity while contributing to the larger project of her practice: exploring how formal syntax gives rise to meaning, emotion, and perceptual complexity.
Across these modalities, Register’s work interrogates the role of formal syntax as a generative, communicative force. She treats the surface not as a site of depiction but as a space of responsiveness—where meaning is not imposed, but discovered through the shifting interplay of material, perception, and time.