Detail view of installation:
'Powder Room'
2021
Photo credit: Martina O'shea
Kate Knight works primarily with figurative imagery and is currently studying MA (Fine Art) at City and Guilds of London School of Art 2020/21.
"Historically, craft and tradition has played a vital role in establishing the feminine psyche, and it is these motifs that inspire and traverse my practice.
My work engages with specific materials, such as, chalk pastels made from scratch, genuine gesso, hand made paints, wax, and clay, all of which, I consider to be a conduit for expression. Illuminated by symbolic and material agency, nurtures an awakening of memories into the present, whilst talking with the past. In seeking out materials that incite to transcend us beyond our own materiality, enables an agency that operates visually in unveiling a hidden and silent self, whilst simultaneously, operating in the concealment and disguise of an ambiguous incorporeal experience.
Physical acts engage with performing necromantic attempts to animate the inanimate, things that are too difficult to speak of, and things that cannot be altered in this reality. Perfuming the spirit of the work are aesthetics of magic, in which colour brings fourth experiences of optical interference and illusion. However, grounding the experience are gestures that, physically and abruptly, bring us back down to earth with bite.
Manifesting from the gestures of reverence and disenchantment is a liminal space, where the sacred and profane rub up against one another, in humming vibration."
Knight studied her BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting at Chelsea College of Art and design 2005. She was selected as runner up for the Marmite Prize for Painting 2010 as well as being selected for ‘Artist of the Day’ Flowers Central on Cork Street 2010 by professor Mo Throp. She is a regular participant at London's prestigious Art Car Boot Fair.