Kate Southworth (she/her)

Kate Southworth with 64 Telepathic Moments Photograph by Neil McLeod — Kate Southworth with *64 Telepathic Moments*
Photograph by Neil McLeod

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As a child I spent a lot of time hoping for spiritual visions, slipping into day-dreams, imagining socialism and painting. At the age of sixteen I decided to deepen my relationship with painting, became politically active and set out on my quest for the spiritual. Nothing much has changed except I’ve got a few more words: alchemy, occult, mysteries, non-capitalism, yoga, rituals, matter, magic, spells, dreams, body, organs, soul, distributed network, protocol, webs, fragments, constellations.

For me, the process of painting sometimes connects with a pre-organisational almost-consciousness; a constellation of energies, patterns and forms. Each participating fragmentary strand links with and transforms itself and others through incremental shifts.

I expand the parameters of my painting into the everyday practices of life such as cooking, tending, gardening, preserving, composting, mending, gathering and making. I root these activities in the cycles and rhythms of the calendar year and with reference to lived experience in late capitalism. This intimacy with the external world loops back into the internal; each informing the other.

Glorious Ninth 2001-2011

Glorious Ninth was a partnership between Kate Southworth and the late Patrick Simons. They worked together from 2001 until 2011. From 2001-2004 they made digital paintings, collages, music and sound works for gallery display and for the Internet. Due to the obsolescence of some of the software, it is now only possible to experience these works in other formats: still images, sound files, videos and text. None of these adequately capture the essence of the work and its context. Although much of their early work utilised and critiqued new technologies, there was also a deep engagement with the traumas of death and dying. From 2004 they expanded our work from the purely digital to include the politics and joy of everyday living. They made paintings and music and devised rituals and rites that involved bread-making, walking, gardening, composting, cooking and gatherings. Their work was experienced by those that lived in or visited their house and garden, and by a wider audience when the work was presented online, at festivals and exhibitions. They continued making work together until Patrick Simons’ untimely death in June 2011.

Their work has been disseminated nationally and internationally and is archived in online collections.

Patrick Simons, artist, composer, musician, and so very much more, 1963-2011