About
Artist Statement
Kate Southworth is an Irish-British artist based in Cornwall, UK. Her work unfolds as a living cosmology, interweaving painting, drawing, ritual, and symbolic enquiry. Through receptive drawing, planchette work, and dream-based exploration, she brings emergent shadows into form—bridging conscious and unconscious realms. Herbs such as mugwort and yarrow often accompany her process as ritual companions. This approach holds a tension between fluidity and clarity, intuition and structure, allowing unseen forces to find material shape.
Rooted in co-creation with veiled beings and liminal spaces, her practice weaves together conscious, unconscious, and subtle realms. It indexes a soul painting its own transformation and continues to unfold in real time. Fragments come together as provisional constellations in exhibitions, books, talks, courses and events.
You can follow its evolution and reflections in The Threaded House; a place where reflections, calendrical art, ritual explorations, drawings and paintings weave together.
Artist Biography
Kate’s work is supported by practice-based research, including a PhD in Fine Art and has been disseminated nationally and internationally. In addition to solo and two-person shows, her work has been included in more than 39 group exhibitions including The Order of the Sun and Moon at The College of Psychic Studies, London, Craftivism at Arnolfini, Bristol, and is archived in online collections. She was quoted extensively in Vox magazine’s 2022 article on ‘Why we need rituals, not routines’ and her work was featured in Interalia magazine’s issue on Alchemy, Occult and Esoteric Art Practices; ‘Ritual Forms and Transformation’. She was interviewed about her paintings, rituals, politics, network forms and calendrical practices by Marc Garrett for the Furtherfield Podcast.
She has taught at Universities in London, Dublin and Cornwall and has given talks on contemporary art at Tate St.Ives, Tate Britain and Tate Modern.
She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Manchester Polytechnic, and went on to complete an MSc with Distinction in Multimedia Systems at the London Guildhall University. She earned a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds, where her supervisors were art theorist, Professor Griselda Pollock, and artist, Professor Chris Taylor.
Glorious Ninth (2001–2011)
Between 2001 and 2011, Kate Southworth collaborated closely with the late Patrick Simons under the name Glorious Ninth. Together they explored ritual, magic, painting, sound, and digital art, blending new media and traditional practices in experimental, deeply personal ways. Their work engaged with themes from the politics of digital networks to the traumas of death and the joys of everyday life.
Some early works now exist only in transformed formats due to technology changes. From 2004, their work expanded to include everyday life and communal practices involving painting, music, rituals, bread-making, gardening, and gatherings.
The partnership ended with Patrick Simons’ death in 2011. Their shared work is recognized nationally and internationally and preserved in online archives.
For more information about Glorious Ninth, please see Glorious Ninth