We recently connected with Kate Hooray Osmond and have shared our conversation below.

Kate Hooray, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

One of the most meaningful projects that I have had the honor to foster was to serve as the messenger between two very different geographical places: Charleston, South Carolina and the North Pole. These two places are intimately connected by water. Charleston is a coastal town that receives the brunt of climate forces and sea-level rise is planned to permanently displace many residents and their cultural places. Svalbard is the Northernmost island in the world, home to glaciers, and sea-ice. It is also warming more quickly than many other places on Earth.
I took messages of welcome from residents of my town to the ice in Svalbard in anticipation of its journey across the ocean to our shores. Rather than negative, fearful messages, I was given warm messages of love: songs, dances, and poems to perform for the ice.
The experience of delivering and recording the messages in the frozen arctic was extremely difficult and moving. It took me a long time to recover and I shall never forget the experience or the friends that supported me along the way.

Kate Hooray, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am an interdisciplinary artist whose main focus is the visual world: what we see and how we see it with our minds-eye. My intention is for the viewer of my work to be presented with new perspectives with which to view life and a call to release judgement in favor of wonder. I travel to new locations often and prefer to capture the world from views that are non-traditional: from a helicopter, or ship, or crane.
I believe that when we acknowledge different views and paths in life, we allow time to stop and life to be free to unlock the wonder the surrounds is. This action may be performed through my paintings, or through planting native plants in disturbed industrial areas, or by fostering collaborations between two disparate people.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I learned that Writers-Block is a fallacy. It doesn’t exist. To illustrate: if you are walking through a forest and a tree lies across your path, what do you do? You don’t sit there and wait for the tree to drop. You decide to turn back or go around. There are always multiple paths through any obstacle, even if it is your own doing.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

The art business, like any self-employed business, can be tricky. There have been times where I have been sick from the overwhelming amount of work that lay before me, and there have been times when I was left questioning my chosen path and felt like a failure. As these times seem to repeat over the years, I have learned that the truth and the authencity only lies in believing in myself, my flexibility, and my opportunity to pivot to modalities that feed myself body and soul.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.katehoorayosmond.com
• Instagram: katehoorayosmond