About My Work
My work moves between painting, writing, ritual and symbolic enquiry. It becomes a place where strands of distributed psyche gather momentarily, their traces taking tentative form.
I make fragile protocols, the barest parameters with which to begin, without determining the outcome. There is a particular kind of attunement involved: entering a space where work can be partly made and partly received. Strange little things emerge. Landscapes with unfamiliar elements. Sometimes several things from the moors and their histories co-exist; sometimes wombs and placentas. Fragments, threads, webs and networks recur, as forms and also as ways of thinking: connection, transmission, memory and relation.
I find myself circling around something mostly unknown: psyche, the imaginal, the spirit world, energies, consciousness and unconsciousness, the threshold between.
I read about ancient practices of encountering psyche and about alchemy. I practice yoga and meditation. I experiment with active imagination, automatic drawing and writing, parsemage, decalcomania, collage and planchette work.
I try to articulate what is happening. I suspect it connects with transformation: yes, psychological, trans-personal, shared, and also entangled with material conditions, histories, bodies and relations of power. How we think seems just as important as what we think. It runs through everything. For me, this means insights from feminism, Marxism and postcolonial thought meet with alchemical and imaginal traditions.
And, just as it seems to be an unfathomable tangle of knots, I turn towards the sky and the ever-changing patterns of darkness, lightness and twilight. The calendar year offers a complement to those other, invisible patterns of change. It’s another way of circling, perhaps spiralling around something: emergence, flourishing, dissolution, dormancy and return to the new.
Intuited and seen. The work stays open to what cannot be fully known in advance.
About Kate Southworth
Kate Southworth is an artist based in St Ives, Cornwall. She paints, writes and makes rituals, working around landscape, psyche and the imaginal. Her work moves between conscious and unconscious activity, and between intention and processes that are partly receptive. She works with the eight transition points of the calendar year, and experiments with automatic techniques including parsemage, decalcomania, collage and planchette work.
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. Her work recently appeared in Tranceducers: Collection of Mediumistic and Visionary Art, London.
She completed a PhD in Fine Art at the University of Leeds with Professors Griselda Pollock and Chris Taylor.
She has delivered talks on contemporary art at Tate St Ives, Tate Modern and Tate Britain.
About glorious ninth
Patrick Simons was a composer, musician, and artist. We worked together as glorious ninth for a decade. From 2001 until Patrick’s death in 2011. The early work was digital. Made for galleries and the internet. Much of that work now exists only in traces: still images, sound files, videos, texts. None capture its fullness. For twenty years we shared our lives. Together. With our children. Painting and music unfolded alongside rituals woven into our daily life. The work carried grief and shadow. It carried joy: bread-making, gardening, composting, cooking, walking, gathering. Some works unfolded in the intimate spaces of our house and garden. Others travelled to festivals and exhibitions. Our work. Our life. A vital part of the mesh of my practice.