During a visit to the west of Ireland, Katharine experienced what she calls her “Irish awakening,” that is, an awareness that nature is infused by God - an understanding that is reminiscent of the worldview held by the pre-Christian Druids of the island. Her intense affinity with the landscape and the Bronze Age sites that developed into the ancestral lands of the O Lochlainn clan - her ancestors - invited her to enter into a deep search for her roots and identity.
The art of Katharine Lochnan is since driven by the search for a “mystical component,” a visual element in the landscape that imbues the scene with the revelation of the divine presence. Her pictorial search for the re-creation of the mystical experience expresses the sense of belonging and being one with the history of the landscape. In the Burren of County Clare, for example, history is marked by evidence of ancient settlements, memorials in the form of the dolmens of the Druids, and the terrain itself that emerged after the last Ice Age. In that land, she experiences a serenity suggestive of the eternal stillness that embraces even the past tragedies of battle.
In her life and artistic practice, Katharine brings forth a timeless quest, one of articulating the experience of the transcendent – a sense, an intuition, a feeling of unity that goes beyond the rational, perceived separation of “oneself” from everything else. Through her treatment of light, for example, she strives to re-create the elements that revealed to her the sense of communion and fullness.
The journey the viewer is invited to undertake when encountering Katharine’s work, is to sustain a relation between the world and the self. As the relation deepens, there emerges an intuition of the infinite that suggests itself as the ground where both participants, the world and the self, unite.
Katharine’s landscapes can be perceived as seeking, devotional images that articulate and share a feeling of unity and belonging, a communion with a timeless whole.
