About
Artist Statement
Kate Southworth creates constellation-based works rooted in a deep exploration of transformation and the hidden dimensions of the psyche. Her practice positions painting within networks of ritual, symbolic enquiry, and writing. Drawing from decades of practice-based research, she has devised a form in which each artwork unfolds as a constellation that brings together paintings, textual fragments, dream materials, and enacted processes distributed across time and space.
Her paintings develop through automatic and receptive techniques, then evolve through successive layering and considered micro-decisions, building surfaces where figurative forms, cosmic terrains, and geometric structures accumulate through processes of emergence and response.
This constellation form, developed through PhD research and informed by feminist reconfigurations of alchemy and network theory, creates distributed works that resist conventional object-based categorisation. Rather than fixed compositions, each constellation offers a provisional structure of coherence while preserving the generative potential of its interconnected elements.
This approach combines explorations of the psyche with network theory, exploring how web-like organisational forms underpin both psychic processes and distributed networks.
Southworth's work operates at the intersection of material painting and immaterial processes, where transformation becomes both subject and method. Here, the soul paints its own transformation across multiple registers of experience, creating works that operate as dynamic repositories of psychic, material, and creative investigation. Through this approach, the soul paints its own transformation across multiple registers of experience, creating works that operate as dynamic repositories of psychic, material, and creative investigation.
Collections: Whitney Museum of American Art (Net Art Idea Line), Rhizome Artbase (New Museum, New York)
Institutional Presentations: Tate St Ives, Tate Modern, Tate Britain
Education: PhD Fine Art, University of Leeds (Supervisors: Professor Griselda Pollock, Professor Chris Taylor)
Biography
Kate Southworth is an Irish-British artist based in St Ives, Cornwall, whose constellation-based practice has developed over decades of sustained creative enquiry. Her work positions her within contemporary discourse on painting, network theory, and feminist approaches to transformation, while drawing from historical lineages of consciousness-based art practice.
Her theoretical foundation includes a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds, supervised by Professor Griselda Pollock and Professor Chris Taylor. This academic grounding, combined with extensive institutional engagement, has established her voice within discussions of contemporary painting and interdisciplinary practice. She has delivered presentations at Tate St Ives, Tate Modern, and Tate Britain, and her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Rhizome Artbase at the New Museum, New York.
Her recent projects include The Order of the Sun and Moon, a collaborative exhibition and discussion series in which she and three other artists discussed their work in relation to artist, Ithell Colquhoun. Southworth's practice has been supported by multiple Arts Council England awards. Her work spans solo and group exhibitions and academic presentations that demonstrate her constellation-based form.
Glorious Ninth (2001–2011)
Between 2001 and 2011, Kate Southworth collaborated extensively with Patrick Simons under the name Glorious Ninth, developing pioneering approaches to interdisciplinary practice that integrated ritual, painting, sound, and digital art. Their work explored the intersection of network technologies with traditional creative practices, engaging themes from digital politics to communal life.
Working during the early formation of network culture, Glorious Ninth created experimental works that anticipated many current concerns around digital materiality and distributed practice. From 2004, their methodology expanded to encompass everyday creative activities including painting, music, ritual enactments, bread-making, gardening, and communal gatherings—combining network art approaches with aspects of relational aesthetics in ways that were innovative for the time.
As part of the collaboration, which ended with Simons' death in 2011, Southworth established foundational approaches to constellation-based working that continue to inform her current practice. Their work received national and international recognition and remains preserved in digital archives, representing an important early exploration of hybrid artistic methodologies.