Katherine Filice is an award-winning abstract artist based in Northern California, best known for her evocative multimedia works, which art critic Nancy Kay Turner described as “sensuous, tactile, and provocative.” Drawing inspiration from centuries-old forests and the practice of Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing), her work explores themes of spirituality, memory, and human connectivity. Her practice merges ink, oil painting, drawing, and a range of found and natural materials.
Filice’s artistic journey has been shaped by a comprehensive traditional art education and invaluable mentorship from artists, critics, and curators through several New York-based critique programs, including the Yellow Chair Salon and NYC Crit Club, along with continuing education at UC Santa Cruz and Stanford University. In addition to her fine art practice, she founded and led a highly successful creative studio in Silicon Valley for over 30 years, earning numerous design awards for her commercial work. She holds a BS degree from the University of San Francisco, and her professional and educational background deeply influence her exploration of human relationships and their reflection within the natural world.
Filice’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, and is held in private and corporate collections worldwide. She recently presented a solo exhibition, The Nature of Things, at Be Seen Gallery in Northern California. Other solo exhibitions include Lost in the Woods at the Pacific Art League and Lost & Found at 1202 Contemporary. In 2024, her work was included in group exhibitions at the New Museum Los Gatos and the Triton Museum in Santa Clara. She was also included in the Monterey Museum of Art Biennial (2025). Katherine served on the San Benito County Arts Council Curatorial Committee and has been an AIVA judge for over 15 years.
Statement
My practice is centered on a material dialogue with the forest. Each work begins as an encounter, with ink, sculpted paper, mica, ground stone, paint, and found natural elements layered with marks that carry both intention and accident. I often bury raw canvas for seasons at a time, allowing soil, weather, and time to leave their own record. These processes create substrates shaped as much by the land as by my hand.
The forests of Northern California are not so much subjects as collaborators. Bark fragments, beetle-carved patterns, and other natural forms become structural components, shifting the work into a space where drawing, painting, and sculpture converge. Through these materials, I explore how place holds memory and how the natural world journals events in ways we often overlook.
I am interested in the thresholds between what is visible and what is lost, how surfaces store histories, how remnants become evidence, and how connection can be sensed. The resulting works behave as layered documents: part artifact, part gesture, and part ecological and spiritual record.
Rather than answering the question "Where are we?" my work proposes that location, both physical and spiritual, is porous. We exist within multiple spaces at once: the remembered, the felt, the inherited, and the unseen.