Artist Kat Kinnick draws from her New Mexico surroundings to visualize a world more aligned with nature.
As I approach Kat Kinnick’s home and studio, the view to my right reveals goats scheming in their pen beneath leafless cottonwoods. Nearby is a Ford van outfitted with a green wooden camper with a hand-painted sign reading, “GROOVY!”
Kinnick later tells me that segment of the property houses musician and Madrid Film Festival co-founder Joe West. His father, painter and adobe architect Jerry West, built the complex of structures, which appeared to be sculpted directly from the oxidized gully hiding this compound from view of the world.
Kinnick welcomes me inside with a warm introduction and hot tea. In the kitchen, we talk about how nature-filled childhoods molded us and how those idyllic memories might have amplified the allure of gritty, working-class cities as we grew into adults. This morphs into pondering what it means to fiercely care for both amidst our nation’s systemic failure and global climate collapse.
“We already had so much work to do, and now we’re even backtracking from that point, and just feeling so much fatigue,” she tells me. “I feel like we really need self-care and love and connection and joy. We really need to recharge our battery. And that’s… what nature has to offer.”
We really need to recharge our battery. And that’s what nature has to offer.
She attributes her attunement to the natural world to an upbringing in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, where she lived on a quarter acre with goats, sheep, dogs, and rabbits, as well as a horse who lived on a neighbor’s property. From an early age, New Mexico’s multiculturalism and folk art legacy influenced her creative development. By the time she turned thirteen, she knew she was going to be an artist. It was her way of cultivating love in a world that tends to forget its importance.
“I’ve always believed love… really changes things. Love and celebration and joy and presence—because then you love something and you want to care for it,” she tells me. “I see art as being a part of that value system.”
Upstairs, in a spacious, light-filled nook with many windows, loosely organized homewares, art supplies, and other personal ephemera, a marigold and cream-colored quilt adorned with cross- stitched daffodils rests neatly on the bed.
Covering the full expanse of a drawing table, there’s a sheet of paper stretching as long as my arm, a work in progress made in preparation for her solo show, Memento Vivere, on view at Hecho a Mano in Santa Fe through June 2, 2025. Detailed figures of a woman leading a horse, a dog, and a little cat emerge from the page. I can sense that a world teeming with life already exists within the negative space. Kinnick tells me she takes a sculptural approach to painting, and gouache allows her to make responsive, instinctual decisions as the composition materializes. Like many of her other paintings, this one is a collage of her geographical memory, composed of visual reference points scattered throughout New Mexico and beyond.
Through the windows, we can see it is now snowing. Not enough to stick, but after another bone-dry winter, we are both grateful for whatever water graces the soil. We make our way back downstairs to the detached studio space where she is working on glazing ceramics and making linocut prints. A wood stove smolders in the corner of the room.
Kinnick points to a recently completed painting on the wall where she experimented with making tiny linocut stamps, an idea inspired by Carrizozo-based artist Paula Wilson’s interdisciplinary practice. The tiled patterns layered over gentle, luminous colors create a dreamlike scene showing a mother telling her son bedtime stories, with a menagerie floating overhead. In a way, I feel transported back to my own childhood, if only for a brief moment.
“It feels like when you’re falling asleep, and you’re kind of drifting off like a cloud and the dream world is entering,” she says. “But it’s also real, like magical realism.”
Our attention turns toward a blue-and-white scene with more animals and plants. All are at-risk species in New Mexico—black-footed ferrets, vermilion flycatchers, Mexican spotted owls, and nighthawks. She points out the little hedgehog cacti, genus Echinocereus, which people poach from public lands to make a profit—an act that, as a former botanist, makes me prickle with rage.
It feels like when you’re falling asleep, and you’re kind of drifting off like a cloud and the dream world is entering.
There may be cause for interrogating the connection between 19th-century landscape painting and the ecological degradation we see in the Southwest today. Historically, expansionist governments promoted the style to subliminally sell the citizenry masculine fantasies of domination. Nature was to be conquered, virgin land ripe for subjugation.
I like to think Newton’s third law—every action has an equal and opposite reaction—can be applied ontologically, not just to physics. In this sense, Kinnick creates naturescapes rendering anthropocentrism passé, channeling her sensitivity as a feminizing force. Her exaltation of the whimsical is both a vehicle and a salve for broaching difficult realities. In turn, she guides us to visualize a world more aligned with nature, where healing and care are at the forefront.
“It’s kind of like a foundation for health and well-being—your connection to place and the landscape,” she says. “Humans are really complex too, so it’s kind of like a nod to that… drama. I like there being this underlying darkness and also light at the same time.”
