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With her abstract style of photography, Katherine Minott celebrates the beauty hidden in everyday objects, the sacred hidden in the mundane. She is infatuated with inanimate objects long past their prime. Why? Peeling paint, wrinkled, tattered cloth, and rusted steel teach us about transience. And they impart three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. Minott celebrates these teachings in her photographic images which reflect the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi (an intuitive way of living that emphasizes finding beauty in imperfection, and accepting the natural cycle of growth and decay). The images are a celebration of authentic change and homage to teachers of transience.

These teachers are found in classrooms disguised as junkyards, abandoned ranches, hoarders’ backyards, and long-forgotten trailer parks—all scattered about the desert Southwest where the sun works its magic. It is here that Minott captures the patinas on boxcars, 50-gallon barrels, and water tanks, and discovers the hidden life of rust on the backside of discarded paint cans. This is how her abstract photographs are born.