Kathryn Bilharz Gabriel comes from a family of engineers, doctors, and chemists. Her grandfather was among the first nuclear physicists in the United States. At ten she became the youngest recipient of a NASA art award, which sent her to Washington for a week of astronaut lectures and then to Space Camp. The stars stayed in her visual language after that.

She has since made her familial heritage and scientific interests a working inspiration to her artwork. Gabriel has worked with Dr. Eric Coughlin, an astrophysicist at Syracuse University, translating research on black holes and gravitational phenomena into visual form. She brings the same curiosity and knowledge to students in the public high school art department she chairs.

Her visual language is further contextualized by traditional stigmas of women in the sciences. Gabriel notes that machinery and physics are territory coded male, but her practice of layered complexity and organic landscapes upend that structure. The soft painted lines paired with drawn geometric and technological overlays introduce romanticism to the hard science behind them. Her work demands the viewer confront the laws of physics as equally feminine to masculine.

Gabriel’s method is reversed from that of many multi-media painters. The painted passages are laid down first, and she draws over them in charcoal, ink, and other media. Gabriel calls the result of her layering a “skin” on the paper. The image is fleshed out with contrasting forms both emerging from and subject to the science from which they began. The painting is submerged beneath drawing. The viewer is submerged in complexity. And the artist is submerged in the making.