Artist Statement

  1. My work begins in psyche and moves through the imaginal, a subtle field between matter and spirit where images act as presences.

  2. Psyche arrives in fragments: dreams, slips of text, layers of paint, somatic listening. I call this unfolding an auto psyche mesh, soul constellating as codex and as site.

  3. Painting lets the imaginal speak through matter. Surfaces layer and dissolve. Figures and terrains appear, vanish, and return.

  4. Writing carries the same fragility. A blue woven rectangle, raw from a dream.

  5. Each work belongs to a living network. A dream connects to a painting. A ritual threads through text and digital trace. An image lies dormant until another part of the mesh calls it into being.

  6. These distributed imaginal systems move through bodies, materials, and technologies.

  7. I work with fragile protocols that invite encounter without control. They orient attention through hospitality, allowing each appearance to find its own form.

  8. Within a world that values acceleration and extraction, such protocols slow perception and cultivate a different way of relating, one grounded in listening, permeability, and care.

  9. Dreams advise. They offer perspective, warning, and encouragement. They remind me that paintings have no edges; they keep moving. Sometimes a snapshot is taken and hung on the wall.

Current Works

2025–ongoing: The Ninefold Year
A ritual rhythm of making and offering. Painting, writing, and dream follow the seasonal turn. Each threshold invites a response from the imaginal field. Works unfold, rest, and return within the cycle.

2025–ongoing: Shewings
An auto-psyche codes. Fragments. Writing, painting, ritual, dream. A shifting mesh, a codex container and a field for psyche’s emergence.

2025–ongoing: Sharing Site and Psyche
An auto-psyche site. Fragments. Painting, writing, ritual in connection with other psyches, living, absent, gone.

Glorious Ninth

  1. Patrick Simons was a composer, musician, and artist.

  2. We worked together as Glorious Ninth for a decade. From 2001 until Patrick’s death in 2011.

  3. The early work was digital. Made for galleries and the internet.

  4. Much now exists only in traces: still images, sound files, videos, texts. None capture its fullness.

  5. For twenty years we shared our lives. Together. With our children.

  6. Painting and music unfolded alongside rituals woven into our daily life.

  7. The work carried grief and shadow. It carried joy: bread-making, gardening, composting, cooking, walking, gathering.

  8. Some works unfolded in the intimate spaces of our house and garden. Others travelled to festivals and exhibitions.

  9. Our work. Our life. A vital part of the mesh of my practice.

Biography

Kate Southworth is an artist based in St Ives, Cornwall. Her practice moves between painting, writing, and ritual. She explores the relation between psyche, the imaginal, material, and time through fragmentary processes she describes as an auto psyche mesh. She completed a PhD in Fine Art at the University of Leeds with Professors Griselda Pollock and Chris Taylor.

Her work has been shown internationally and is represented in collections including the Net Art Idea Line at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Rhizome Artbase at the New Museum in New York. In 2025 her work appeared in Tranceducers: Collection of Mediumistic and Visionary Art, London.

She is currently developing a body of work structured around the Ninefold Year, a rhythm of offerings that follows the turning of the seasons and the movement of the imaginal.

She has delivered talks on contemporary art at Tate St Ives, Tate Modern, and Tate Britain, and has received multiple awards from Arts Council England. She previously collaborated as part of Glorious Ninth (2001–2011) and more recently as part of The Order of the Sun and Moon, a project engaging with the practice of Ithell Colquhoun.

Exhibitions, Talks & Collections

Exhibitions (Selected)

2025 — Tranceducers: Collection of Mediumistic and Visionary Art, CPS Gallery Soho, London (curated by Vivienne Roberts; with Ithell Colquhoun, Madge Gill, Georgiana Houghton, Nnena Kalu)
2025 — The Order of the Sun and Moon: In the Land of the Living Stones, The Crypt Gallery, St Ives
2024 — The Order of the Sun and Moon, The College of Psychic Studies, London
2023 — The Order of the Sun and Moon: St Ives, The Crypt Gallery, St Ives
2022 — Scattered, online exhibition (solo)
2019 — WEB-RETRO, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea (30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web; re-versioning of Glorious Ninth work)
2019 — Fertile Darkness, The Fish Factory Art Space, Penryn, Cornwall (solo)
2016 — Midpointness, Airspace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent (curated by Steve Dutton and Andrew Bracey)
2009 — Craftivism, Arnolfini, Bristol (Glorious Ninth)
2009 — ISEA 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Belfast (Glorious Ninth)
2008 — NetArt Open, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (Glorious Ninth)

Talks & Presentations (Selected)

2025 — Artist talks, The Order of the Sun and Moon: In the Land of the Living Stones, The Crypt Gallery, St Ives
2024 — “The Alchemical Soul Paints Itself Transforming,” Alchemy Conference, University of Oxford
2024 — “An Exploration of Art and Magic,” The Order of the Sun and Moon, College of Psychic Studies, London
2023 — “Art, the Academy and the Occult,” with Emma Sharples, Treadwell’s Books, London
2023 — Artist talk with Dr Amy Hale, The Order of the Sun and Moon, Treadwell’s Books, London
2010 — “Distributed Art: Distributed Exhibitions,” Beyond the Academy symposium, Tate Britain
2007 — “Free Software and Open Source as Contemporary Art,” Social Systems exhibition, Tate St Ives
2007 — Chair and co-organiser, Disrupting Narratives, Tate Modern

Collections (Selected)

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (Net Art Idea Line, Artport Digital Collection)
Rhizome Artbase, New Museum, New York
Soundtoys Artbase
Private collections