Biography
Kate Southworth is an Irish/British artist based in Cornwall, UK. Her work engages with magic, alchemy, mysticism and other spiritual traditions and she is interested in their relationship with new technologies and digital cultures. Her work spans painting, drawing, rituals, spells and digital works.
In her work, Southworth draws on the concept of mutuality to explore all the spaces within and around us, including the liminal and interstitial spaces between psyche and landscape, self and other, human and non-human, material and spiritual. For Southworth, mutuality has the potential to become a transformative force that can disrupt centralised and hierarchical structures and contribute to a new understanding of interconnected subjectivity.
Southworth's paintings often depict dreamlike and cosmic landscapes that are inspired by the remotest regions of Cornwall and Ireland. They reference the transformations of the calendar year, pregnancy, birth and the maternal, and the emergence of new forms of becoming. They often depict a range of animals, including birds, horses, serpents, seahorses and strange, otherworldly creatures that seem to emerge from a world beyond our own. Her work involves the use of ritual in painting and in the landscape as a way of encountering that which rests elsewhere.
Her work has been disseminated nationally and internationally. In addition to solo and two-person shows, it has been included in more than 35 group exhibitions including 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 calendric 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 her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Manchester Polytechnic, and went on to complete an MSc in Multimedia Systems at the London Guildhall University. She later earned a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds, where her supervisors were the artist Chris Taylor and art theorist Griselda Pollock.