Kathy Mitchell-Garton is an artist and writer living in Colorado. Her artwork has been shown at a number of Colorado venues, including aBuzz Gallery, Front Range Community College, and 40 West Arts. Working primarily with photographs printed on fabric and illuminated with beads and embroidery thread, she creates intimate landscapes of overlooked aspects of our natural world.  Her writing has appeared in Progenitor, Feile-Feste, Flashquake, and Toasted Cheese, and her chapbook Invocation (2009) was awarded the Best Call to Action in the exhibit “Eat Here Now” held at 910Arts in Denver. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University in Boulder.

I work with photographs I’ve taken of the natural and built environment. I chose to combine two photographs, one of a natural subject (a tree trunk) and the other from the built environment (an asphalt parking lot) to speak to the duality of being human—we are of nature and also apart from it. I decided to bring in other natural and human-made materials for the face: a metal coin, bone, rock and glass beads. The photographs are printed onto fabric and then glued onto the mask. The beads are sewn onto fabric and then adhered to the mask.