My studio is located in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
I am currently writing a text titled NEUROPLASTIC ROT
I am working on new bodies of work for potential exhibitions.
I have written a one act play, LAST BITES.
I have released one collection of poetry , SCARY BRAIN TRICK.
I am working on my first comic, OOZE OPERATOR

I am available to teach, and be a visiting artist at your establishment of higher education.

I increasingly understand my works as fan fiction to Secretionism — speculative, material, and somatic expansions of its internal logic. Rather than illustrating theory, the sculptures, paintings, comics, and texts behave as apocryphal entries within an evolving ontological system, where ooze, nervous structures, and perceptual fragmentation index the ongoing metabolism of thought. In this sense, each work misreads the theory productively, secreting new forms that retroactively alter the conceptual canon from which they emerged. Secretionism, as a theoretical framework, does not function for me as a closed doctrine but as an unstable canon — a living cosmology composed of ooze, nervous systems, distributed perception, and the ongoing secretion of thought into material form. Within this structure, each artwork operates less as an illustration of theory and more as a speculative artifact produced from inside its logic.

The sculptures, comics, texts, and sonic works behave as apocryphal entries in an expanding Secretionist archive — what might be called an ommatidial index — where perception is faceted, partial, and internally stored. Materials such as gauze, resin, wood, corrosion, and printed narrative skins do not merely embody ideas; they misread them. This productive misreading is central. Like fan fiction, the works extend the source text through distortion, attachment, and reinterpretation, allowing the theory to be re-authored by its own material consequences.

In this sense, Secretionism is both the originating text and the mutable substrate, while the artworks function as metabolized annotations: narrative, anatomical, and somatic revisions that retroactively alter the conceptual canon from which they emerge. The studio becomes a site of recursive authorship, where theory secretes form and form, in turn, rewrites theory.

This is my Master of Fine Arts Thesis, ONTOLOGICAL EXAUSTION AND METABOLIC AFFECT, should you care to read. There are images of my artworks included.

A work is not an object optimized for circulation; it is a record of thinking, a material event, a nervous system made visible. The mind is not static, and the models I look to involving intelligence are anti-essentialist.

Experimentation is not aesthetic flair — it is an ethical stance. To experiment is to allow uncertainty, to let materials misbehave, to permit failure, and to reject the demand that art justify itself through immediate readability or exchange value. The studio becomes a laboratory for forms of attention that capitalism erodes: slowness, sensitivity, contradiction, and embodied thought.

This position is inseparable from feminist epistemologies that recognize knowledge as situated, relational, and lived through the body. I treat materials as collaborators rather than tools, and the act of making as a negotiation between internal states, physical substances, and historical forces. Intuition, care, mess, and emotional intelligence are not weaknesses to discipline out of the work; they are forms of rigor. The so-called “irrational” is often where the most complex thinking lives.

My practice is shaped by neurodivergent and disability-informed ways of perceiving and processing. Nonlinear attention, sensory intensity, cognitive drift, fatigue, and altered rhythms of productivity are not obstacles to overcome in order to “function” as an artist; they are generative conditions. Divergent perception produces different spatial logics, different temporalities, and different relationships between body and material. What dominant culture frames as impairment often becomes, in the studio, a method — a way of noticing, lingering, and reorganizing experience.

Because of this, I resist normative timelines of output and the moralization of productivity that underlies both capitalism and the art market. Rest, pause, repetition, and return are built into my process. Work may stall, fragment, or change direction; this is not failure but evidence of a living system adjusting. Disability here is not metaphor — it is a material and cognitive reality that reshapes how making unfolds, insisting on interdependence, adaptation, and care as structural principles.

I resist the performance of professionalism that pressures artists to produce coherent brands and market-friendly identities. Instead, I embrace multiplicity, opacity, and becoming. A body of work should contradict itself. It should leak. It should change its mind. This instability is not a liability — it is evidence that the work is alive.

Art, in this philosophy, is not a commodity category but a mode of consciousness. It allows us to rehearse other value systems — ones based in attention, interdependence, and transformation. To make work this way is to practice a different relation to time, to labor, and to selfhood. It is a quiet but persistent counter-practice to the logics of extraction and optimization that structure both the market and daily life.

Making, then, is not about producing objects for validation. It is about building conditions where perception can change — beginning with the maker, and extending outward through the forms that emerge.

contact: katelyn.farstad@gmail.com
CV provided upon request

CUNY Hunter MFA 2025
MCAD BFA 2010
Bauhaus Weimar 2009

I have exhibited at Midway Contemporary Art
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

I make music under the moniker ITCH PRINCESS and rarely perform. Here is the most recent review for my album FILLER GUISE.