Katie Mooney

Born in Liverpool and now based in London, Katie Mooney is a self-taught artist whose practice is deeply entangled with the natural world. Informed by a background in conservation and museology, her work draws on experience gained at renowned institutions including the V&A and the Natural History Museum. Situated between scientific inquiry and poetic speculation, Katie’s practice challenges the rigid taxonomies through which we attempt to order the living world around us.

Her recent series Symbiosis is emblematic of a wider practice rooted in biological epistemology. Densely textured paintings begin with neon underpaintings—conceived by Katie as a connective ether or life force—over which she layers forms inspired by successive organisms such as lichen, fungi, and moss. Often overlooked in everyday life, these organisms are reimagined at an immersive scale, suggesting complex interdependencies that resist anthropocentric systems of classification.

Through a materially rich and ecologically attuned visual language, she offers a quietly radical proposition: to see the world not as a set of discrete, isolated categories, but as a mesh of symbiotic relations—unstable, co-evolving, and persistently alive. Her work resists fixity, instead inviting viewers to reimagine how we relate to one another and to the more-than-human world.

Katie works primarily with acrylic, ink, oil pastel, and paint on linen canvas or handmade cotton rag paper, her studio is in West London.

She was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2025 and is exhibiting with Ad Lib Gallery in Wimbledon Village.

View a selection of Katie’s latest works below ↓