Kate Sherman
Fastened, Not Fixed
Kate Sherman builds paintings the way an engineer might—fastened, weighted, structured for endurance. She grew up on the Jersey Shore in a nautically themed restaurant, surrounded by neon signage, carnival rides, and rusting metal. “I think about how things hold under stress—boats, bridges, airplanes. Materials degrade, paint fades, structures shift. I’m interested in that threshold between stability and collapse.” That fascination with impermanence, with surfaces worn by time, forms the foundation of her work.
Now based in New York, Sherman balances two worlds—fine art and industrial painting. She works at Colossal Media, where she hand-paints large-scale murals and watches them age, shift, and interact with the elements. “There’s a rhythm to deterioration—how weather distorts a surface, how layers of paint reveal time. I want to capture that before it disappears.”
Lately, she’s been embedding fasteners into her compositions—small-scale analogs to the rivets that hold ships and airplanes together. “A rivet is strong because it allows for movement. A weld can snap under pressure. I think about that in people too—some are flexible, some are brittle.” Her paintings hum with this industrial logic, referencing airplane fuselages, bridge facades, and weathered infrastructure without ever becoming literal. “I like the in-between space—where something isn’t quite a painting, but not fully an object either.”
Process is central to her work. She moves fast, responding instinctually, layering paint, scraping it back, building it up again. “I make better work when I’m not overthinking. Some pieces are finished before I even realize they are.” The structure, however, takes time—cutting metal, fastening panels, preparing surfaces. “I need that balance—part of the work happens in a blur, part of it forces me to slow down.”
Sherman’s interest in material-based painting stems from her background in printmaking. “Printmakers work with metal plates, chemical reactions, the physicality of the surface. I’ve always been drawn to that alchemy.” Recently, she’s begun incorporating sculpture, learning to weld and fabricate metal. “There’s a different logic to sculpture—something has to hold its own weight. But I still think in painting. Even when I work in three dimensions, it’s about composition, surface, tension.”
She spends time thinking about structures—both literal and conceptual. “I listen to a lot of engineering disaster podcasts. Train wrecks, shipwrecks—how a small design flaw can lead to catastrophe. It’s not that different from painting. One wrong decision and everything collapses.” That curiosity about failure, about resilience, about what holds and what gives, threads through all of her work.
Deeply embedded in New York’s artist-run spaces, Sherman curates and exhibits at Field of Play, a Gowanus-based collective. “I want to be part of the New York scene. It’s an ass-kissing train, but I believe in the collective voice of artists here.” She has no illusions about the myth of the lone genius—art, for her, is about movement, a constant exchange of ideas.
Her paintings exist in a state of tension—held together, but never fixed. “Every painting is a puzzle,” she says. “At some point, it clicks into place, and then I stop.”
