Katrina Moorhead (b. 1971, Coleraine, Northern Ireland) makes sculptures and works on paper whose materials and imagery are freighted with social, historical, autobiographical, and emotional associations, and whose meanings are associative, abstract, and never didactic. Moorhead is a material poet, and her work contains subtexts teasing out connections that don’t rise to the level of metaphor but remain at the borders of our comprehension.
Katrina Moorhead earned a BA (1994) and an MFA (1996) from the Edinburgh College of Art. She has participated in numerous residencies including the Galveston Artist Residency (current), the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, (1996-1998), ArtPace in San Antonio (fall 2005), and the SIM Gueststudio, Reykjavik - Association of Icelandic Visual Artists, Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland (2006). Important exhibitions include her solo exhibition A Thing Called Early Blur at the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston (2007); the group exhibition Second Nature: Contemporary Landscapes from the MFAH Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the group exhibition The Luxury of Dirt, Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich, Switzerland (2011); and the group exhibition The Nature of Things, in which she represented Northern Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale. In 2007 Moorhead won the prestigious Texas Art Prize (a biennial award hosted by ArtHouse, Austin), and in 2008 was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painters and Sculptors.
Katrina Moorhead lives and works in Houston, TX.