Bio
BFA, Studio Art, University of Illinois at Chicago
Kate Gonda is a multidisciplinary artist primarily working in conceptual sculpture. Her practice brings together materials and objects including concrete, wood, tissue, mass-produced furniture, wax, plaster, paychecks, and organic matter. In her work, materials and methods become forms of social inquiry. Humor and playfulness provide an entry point to complex subjects, using absurdity to disarm before inviting deeper contemplation and emotional connection.
Gonda combines and recontextualizes objects and materials to produce relationships that are absurd, futile, or alternatively more valuable or animated with meaning. Through physical force and repetitive actions—piercing, poking, pushing, pulling, coating, and suspending—she considers how seemingly ordinary gestures can reflect larger structures of consumption, hierarchy, labor, and control.
Rooted in socio-political observation, her work prods at the social constructs through which we organize, categorize, and assign value to the world, particularly when those structures become restrictive. Her sculptures move between utility and futility, stability and precarity, familiarity and strangeness. With a touch of absurdity, Gonda’s practice oscillates between the satirical and sincere, containing dual meanings, multiple truths, and clever cultural critique.
Work
BFA, Studio Art, University of Illinois at Chicago
Kate Gonda is a multidisciplinary artist primarily working in conceptual sculpture. Her practice brings together materials and objects including concrete, wood, tissue, mass-produced furniture, wax, plaster, paychecks, and organic matter. In her work, materials and methods become forms of social inquiry. Humor and playfulness provide an entry point to complex subjects, using absurdity to disarm before inviting deeper contemplation and emotional connection.
Gonda combines and recontextualizes objects and materials to produce relationships that are absurd, futile, or alternatively more valuable or animated with meaning. Through physical force and repetitive actions—piercing, poking, pushing, pulling, coating, and suspending—she considers how seemingly ordinary gestures can reflect larger structures of consumption, hierarchy, labor, and control.
Rooted in socio-political observation, her work prods at the social constructs through which we organize, categorize, and assign value to the world, particularly when those structures become restrictive. Her sculptures move between utility and futility, stability and precarity, familiarity and strangeness. With a touch of absurdity, Gonda’s practice oscillates between the satirical and sincere, containing dual meanings, multiple truths, and clever cultural critique.