“A major element of Kate Manheim’s striking work is the evocation and transcendence of the pain she has suffered from a neurological condition for the past 20 years. Anticipated in the pained screaming face emerging from a patterned field in a 1988 clairvoyant image, and then developed through the depiction of primitive bodies swollen and contorted with strange postures—this pain is given physical form as it explodes in various parts of the body, or flecking the body as a veil of descending tears in ectoplasm-like rivers—or seeming to burst from the body as a vortex finishing in giant floral forms.In the accompanying series of abstract images, it is as if the nodal points of that bodily pain have projected from that body to fill the psychic space that floats above earthly cares, to establish a new territorial paradise seeded by the flickerings of pain made solid.The pain that rises from the prison of the body takes on the characteristics of a beauty and energy that no longer implies affliction, but rather makes palpable a new and desirableworld of forms that either float through space or imprint upon a newly established earth, implies by the cardboard of paper toweling upon which they are imprinted.Indeed, the fact that most of these pieces are indeed rendered on a surface of ‘discarded’ cardboard ‘trash’, flat or corrugated, or on the humble and ready to be ‘soiled’ paper toweling, re-inforced the impression that these images, scratched from a pulsating psyche encapsulating the very root of pain (a pain to which we are all, vulnerable of course,) –these strange and powerful images managing through an artistic slight-of-hand to redeem such ‘base’ material with the grace and revelation of exploding color, form and texture—an alchemy that lifts it’s trash surfaces into the realm of true spiritual accomplishment — the real action of all genuine art.”