In early August Kate Clements installed a work for her solo exhibition “Chrysalis” at Studios Inc. (photo by Jim Barcus)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art recently acquired a work by the Kansas City artist, who combines floral imagery and glass into eye-catching installations rich in metaphor and commentary
Arranging granulated glass into delicate floral patterns, Kate Clements references and adapts the rich history of flowers in art, design and interior spaces. Her work explores how humans transform built environments by pulling from — and pulling in — the exterior natural world.
Her painterly use of glass consistently catches and holds the eye, playing with our intuitions about inside and outside, human and nature, taste and decadence, decoration and art. She is, she says, “interested in the role nature has played in the discourse on ornamentation and the beautification of space.”
Two recent shows, at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Kiosk Gallery in the West Bottoms, are prime examples of this practice. Included in the “Personal Best” exhibition of local artists at the Nelson-Atkins (on display through Jan. 10, 2027), Clements’ monumental installation Acanthus, recently acquired for the museum’s permanent collection, is “composed of over 150 handmade glass elements” suspended in the air and arranged as the surface of a three-dimensional arch. Upon closer inspection, its clear white panels turn out to be delicate glass strands that trace stem-and-leaf patterns in the empty air.
The artist Garry Noland, in a micro-review on Instagram, commends Clements’ “heroic Acanthus” as “a floating, dream-like sculpture” in whose “step and repeat pattern… ‘negative’ space and ‘positive’ space are equals. One can’t exist without the other. It’s like trying to figure if an exhale or an inhale is more important.”
Acanthus thus replaces the triumphal arch’s civic and martial grandeur with the intimate fragility of breath. Hovering in the air like a hologram, a portal leading nowhere, a threshold supporting nothing, decoration without substrate, Acanthus nonetheless engages our bodies: It provokes both the impulse to walk under it and the knowledge of how disastrous doing so would be — all that glass shattering around you.
Clements says, “Glass has been my metaphor for the precarious nature of life. A material defined by its capacity to hold tension. It can break, shatter, or shift at any moment … a nervous hum beneath the surface.” You can certainly feel that hum in Acanthus, an almost spiritual presence that is exactly part of its charm.
Kate Clements was born in rural Iowa, but her parents grew up in the United Kingdom and imbued her with an international perspective. She travelled to places including Serbia, Montenegro and Hungary with her father: “I grew up looking at things more globally because that’s how my family was spread out.” That internationalism is also reflected in her CV, which includes a feature in Italian Vogue Gioiello and a solo show in Norway, in addition to exhibitions all over the United States.
Clements received a BFA in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute and went on to study at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture in Philadelphia, where she completed an MFA in glass. She lived in Philly “for the better half of a decade,” but constant moving and the high cost of living proved — as it has for many East Coast artists — unsustainable.
Clements says, “Kansas City has been so kind to me over the past six years. It opened doors to opportunities that have introduced me to an amazing community of creatives and a support network that has helped push my career forward in exciting ways.” In that time, she has been a resident at Studios Inc and Charlotte Street, developing a coherent, energetic body of work through ingenious elaborations on her core themes.
Clements’ combined training in painting and glasswork is evident: She uses delicate painterly gestures to create flowers out of granulated glass called frit. Unlike a blown-glass artist, she often works in a two-dimensional mode, allowing her to create panels that blur the line between painting, sculpture and glasswork. Her use of glass, with its liquid ability to hold light, makes it seem a painter’s dream. Vibrant colors suggest layered depths or effect gradient-like transitions through clear, near-white glass. When you consider that painting has sometimes been viewed metaphorically as a window or mirror, the intimate connection between painting and glass becomes apparent.
EXPLORING NATURE’S POTENTIAL FOR ABSTRACTION
In the installation Beloved — whose most recent iteration this past spring at Kiosk Gallery was also that gallery’s final show in their 14-year run — Clements separates her usual synthesis into discrete parts: glass, flowers, mortality, human uses of nature. Floral arrangements, retrieved from funeral homes, were piled in a glass case and displayed for six weeks. Over that period, the flowers wilted, decayed, fogged up the glass and transformed into a snowy landscape of white mold — before resolving into pitch-black goo. The piece evokes grief, Western customs of mourning, cycles of death and rebirth. The display case suggested, to me, an open casket.
And yet, beyond these initial impressions — powerful as they are — the installation is more than its references. It’s a surging exhibition of nature’s potential for abstraction: the poetry of mold, moisture and metamorphosis. The descent from symbol to goo. Nature outpacing reference. The glass case is actually inspired by those used in natural history museums. It offers a concrete commentary on the relationship between flowers and glass, on glass as the medium often used for bringing flowers into human space — looping the worlds of plants and human grief together in the gallery.
Flowers are irresistible icons because they are so often automatically beautiful — which can make it tempting to put them everywhere, to overdecorate, to pick and depict them again and again until so-called good taste sours. For this reason, they pose a subtle challenge to the artist. (How to make them new, as the modernist dictum goes.) Yet, by working through these ideas of taste, exploring kitsch and its overtones of “accessibility and class,” taking on the quiet aesthetic risk posed by flowers, Clements is able to put all these questions in service of a visionary mode that exists at the interface between human space and the natural world.
The name for this interface is, it turns out, wallpaper: another recurring motif for Clements, and an obsession that makes sense considering the major role that flowers have played in this “decorative” art form. It makes even more sense when you learn that Clements’ mother decorated their house with patterns from William Morris and other Arts and Crafts designers.
Clements says, “I think if you saw the wallpaper of our dining room you’d be like ‘Well this explains a lot.’”
Clements is interested in “dated aesthetics,” particularly Victorian-era interiors. Her work captures how taste is informed by nature: Just as “the natural world undergoes endless cycles of transformation and eludes possession, so too does anything and everything society deems ‘beautiful.’” That is, tastes change. Beauty is “a construct both inherently fleeting and subjective.” And what could be more immediately emblematic of changing tastes than wallpaper?
Clements explores the construction — or would it be better to say, the flowering? — of human space through wallpaper. She replaces architecture’s mass, stability and assurances of permanence with the fleeting visions of so-called decoration. Her glass wallpaper-like panels cling to the wall even as they stand ever so slightly before it, with their bright greens and yellows, their pinks and oranges thickened with frit’s crumbly shadow. The panels’ airy interstices reveal the white gallery wall as if to put that “wall” itself in quotes. Could wallpaper replace architecture? Doesn’t it enclose a space as much as the wall? Isn’t it equally a locus for fictions of inside vs. outside, human vs. nature? Could we imagine a room made solely of wallpaper suspended in air? “It’s like the work is a mirage … constantly on the verge of dissolution,” says Clements.
We might think of wallpaper as a painting that has been released from its frame, iterating itself around the room until it has enwrapped the space entirely. In her work, Clements reframes that act of wall-painting, bringing it back down to a size the eye can take in at once, see for what it is. Recent pieces have used wallpaper patterns to (somehow, magically!) create beetle-like forms, lavishly encrusted in granules, pebbles and blobs of additional light-catching glass. These insectoid pieces cling to the wall like decorations suddenly brought to life, a wonderfully discomfiting reversal of nature and design. Other wallpaper-inspired pieces look like mirrors or portals, playing with the transitions between colors to depict nested frames. These pieces suggest that wallpaper might be a way of telling ourselves what’s outside our walls while, at the same time, referring us back to what’s within.
Clements was recently awarded a third place Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant, an international sculpture award which includes a $20,000 grant.
Clements’ work goes on view in November in the “Personal Best” show at the Nelson-Atkins. Her one-person show, “Kate Clements: Chrysalis,” opens Sept. 4 at Studios Inc, 1708 Campbell. For more information about Clements, visit www.kateclementsart.com.
