My creative work explores the intersection of place and emotion through vibrant mixed-media monotypes. For the past four years, my artistic practice has centered on printmaking, heavily inspired by travel and my experiences of both landscape and the built environment. I am interested in documenting places ranging from vast, watery landscapes, such as the Grand Canal in Venice, to the quiet intimacy of an interior space, such as a printmaking studio reading room. In each, I am less interested in simply recording what a place looks like than in interpreting how it feels to be there. I build my prints through layers of deep, saturated color, creating an energetic tension and dialogue between colors that are sometimes stark and sometimes surprisingly subtle. This interplay gives the finished works a joyful, almost celebratory quality, even as the places and experiences that inspire them may carry more complicated emotional associations. More recently, I have begun manipulating these layers to challenge our sense of boundaries and spatial perception. Homes, rooms, landscapes, and relationships can expand and contract, becoming both physical and psychological spaces. Through these shifting layers, I invite viewers to move beyond simply looking at the image and instead imagine themselves entering it—mentally wading, traveling, and inhabiting the spaces within the frame. Ultimately, I hope the work creates a moment in which place becomes less a fixed location and more an emotional experience.
Kathleen Keys has taught in and coordinated the BFA Art Education program at Boise State University since 2005. Beyond her faculty role, Kathleen has also served in many academic leadership capacities at Boise State.
Turning her attention in 2022 from years of written art education research back to art making, Kathleen recently studied printmaking at intensive residency programs in Guanajuato City, Guanajuato, Mexico, and in both Florence and Venice, Italy. She exhibited work in the 2025 Boise State Biannual Faculty Exhibition and began to maintain a formal art studio space beginning in December 2025. Her current studio practice consists of mixed media printmaking and painting. She holds a BFA in painting from the University of Kentucky and both a MA in arts policy administration and a PhD in art education from The Ohio State University.
An avid supporter of the arts community, Kathleen completed a decade of service with the Boise Art Museum’s Board of Trustees in 2022 and rejoined the board in 2024.
More about specific works:
The series, "Homehouse" One to Four, 2024, consists of four mixed media monotypes. It explores the interplay between home as a personal and collective emotional space and house as a physical structure. The combined term, Homehouse, reflects this fused blending. Each work examines what makes a space both a home and a house, as well as a rich repository of experience, growth, and shared history. Employing broad, vibrant areas of intense, energetic color combined with chine collé to keenly represent studies, interests, and travels, the monotypes mark both personal milestones and the collective evolution of the family.
Delicately reflecting themes of change and impermanence, the unfinished structures in the Homehouse monotype series also suggest loss, transformation, and the passage of time. Overall, the layered contrasts in the works aim to create a complex portrayal of family life and to reflect both the joyful and bittersweet experience as the youngest family member prepares to step into the future outside of the spaces and daily evolution of "Homehouse."
"View from the Grand Canal": One and Three, 2025. These two mixed media monotypes, from a variable series of three, explore the intensity of change in the light and color on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, just before and after a storm.
