Katherine Sherwood is a gifted painter who teaches in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. Her nearly abstract paintings combine lithographic brain scans, calligraphic emblems from a 17th-century sorcery text and pigment. Sherwood’s recent work, a testament to the magical process of healing, celebrates the graphic power of medical imaging and her own rehabilitation. A May 1997 stroke, causing partial paralysis and speech impairment, required prolonged physical therapy. Learning to paint with her left hand, the artist found greater freedom than before. Sherwood now incorporates her own angiograms, embedding thread-like tangles of blood vessels in a compositional process that builds up images through mixed materials and borrowed, altered and reassembled imagery.

Katherine Sherwood's website