Biography
Kate Southworth is an Irish/British artist based in Cornwall, UK. Her work indexes a soul painting its own transformation. The work often emerges as non-linear tangles of psyche’s patterns, shapes, stuctures and then slowly transforms into symbols and partial symbols that remain unfamiliar and strange to her conscious mind.
Kate’s artwork is supported by practice-based research, including a PhD in Fine Art, that involves encountering the unconscious Otherworld and indexing that which the unconscious desires to become manifest. She imbibes rituals, operations and processes from magic, alchemy, yoga, mysticism, spirituality and psychoanalysis, to guide her journeying; always bowing to the sacredness of the mysteries. Possibilities emerge for the transmutation of seemingly chaotic material into utterances from Psyche; offered from different perspectives and on different registers.
Each work emerges as a cluster of fragments: paintings, drawings, rituals, herbs, flowers, spells, texts that often exist in different places and different times to each other. Some elements may lay fallow for several years.
Her work references calendrical and other naturally occuring cycles, meshes, webs, weaves, sacred plants, receptivity to darkness, lunar and solar consciousness, alchemical transformation, pregnancy, wombs, placentas, birth, living and dying.
Her work has been disseminated nationally and internationally. In addition to solo and two-person shows, it has been included in more than 37 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 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 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.