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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.

Kate Southworth with 64 Telepathic Moments Photograph by Neil McLeod — Photograph by Neil McLeod

Glorious Ninth 2001-2011

Glorious Ninth was a partnership between Kate Southworth and the late Patrick Simons. They worked together from 2001 until 2011. They made rituals, magic spells, paintings, collages, music and sound works for gallery display and for the Internet. From 2001-2004 they worked within a net art context and made work that engaged with distributed networks and the politics of the digital. Due to the obsolescence of some of the software, it is now only possible to experience these works in other formats: still images, sound files, videos and text. None of these adequately capture the essence of the work and its context. Although much of their early work utilised and critiqued new technologies, there was also a deep engagement with the traumas of death and dying. From 2004 they expanded their work to include the politics and joy of everyday living. They made paintings and music and devised rituals and rites that involved bread-making, walking, gardening, composting, cooking and gatherings. Their work was experienced by those that lived in or visited their house and garden, and by a wider audience when the work was presented online, at festivals and exhibitions. They continued making work together until Patrick Simons’ untimely death in June 2011.

Their work has been disseminated nationally and internationally and is archived in online collections.

Patrick Simons, artist, composer, musician, and so very much more, 1963-2011