Katy Biele: Something to Hang on to
Posted: Mar 22nd, 2023 | Gathering

Katy Biele (B. 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist from Chile, based in Victoria, BC, Canada. Her visual language explores beyond medium and color to create imaginary and intuitive worlds, often inhabited by faces and communicating between paint and fibre. Biele’s work ranges from paintings, fibre art, to expansive installations, using a variety of mediums and materials. Her fibre work is made in a freestyle manner in which she creates contemporary embroidery textures by playing with Latin-American colors.  

Another component of Katy Biele’s work is her painting style, in which she works principally on faces staring out from a parallel reality of imaginary people and vague memories showing family and peoples’ connections. Biele works constantly on commissions for collectors, projects and also releases from her website.

This work is created as part of Gathering, the inaugural installation of our new Collection Gallery, featuring community stories told through our global collection. Grounded in community participation, the installation presents over 40 pieces from the Museum’s permanent collection of over 15,000 objects from around the world. Choices of objects, responses, and retellings were gathered via open online calls for reflection, through partnerships with local organizations, and through artists’ interventions. Gathering explores themes related to migration and diaspora, the search for comfort in the domestic and familial, reclamation of ancestral traditions through contemporary artistic responses, and the relationship between textiles and the environment. 

This video is part of a digital project generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Now initiative.