About
Artist and painter, Kathleen Mullaniff, has a second obsession. An obsession which is at once attached to and envelope her small studio. The visitor is invited into the garden, and eventually through a garland of soft winter hues that surround the entrance to her studio. The borders are dormant now. But cross the threshold into the studio and these same sleeping winter colours are revealed through line and mark, in a series of pristine canvases. Marianne North would recognize the samples of seedpods, branches, twigs, dried petals and leaves imported into the studio from the garden, the salvaged fragments that form the still life source for this series of immaculate paintings. The local girl, intrepid explorer and botanist and the inspiration for Kathleen's new body of work, collected her specimens from the furthest reaches of the natural world. Her expansive travel and analytical account of the exotic, compliments Kathleen's newest work where stepping into the garden, has re-envigorated and affirmed the notion of place, the local close up, an intimate commune with the melancholy of change, the micro into the macro, William Blake's âworld in a grain of sand'. Text by Eugene Palmer.
Kathleen Mullaniff trained at University of the Arts, Camberwell College of Art and Design (BA Fine Art Painting) and at the University of London, Goldsmiths College (MA Fine Art). She has exhibited since 2008 with Andrea Harari of Jaggedart, London.
She has also taken part in Painting as a Foreign Language at Cultura Inglesa Sao Paulo, Fabric Reinterpreting the House at Abbott Hall Art Gallery, Loop at Bankfield Museum, Showhouse: at PM Gallery and House.
Kathleen was awarded an AHRC grant in 2002 in order to research the botanical drawings of Les Roses by Pierre-Joseph Redoute, a French artist of the late 18th/ early 19th century. In 2004 she participated in Purl at The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture where three UK artists and three artists from the USA used the textile archive to make original works. In 2007-08 she participated in Paisley: exploding the teardrop at PM Gallery and House. In 2004 she co-founded the Patternlab and took part in Touch, Textiles, Technology: collaboration across Europe at Goldsmiths College and Containing Culture: Lacking in Discipline at Manchester Metropolitain University. Her current research is focused upon making paintings from the floral images of Marianne North. This will be her second one person exhibition the other being âTraces' which was held at Christchurch Mansion 2004.
Kathleen has taught Fine Art at a number of universities including the Northumbria University, Newcastle and Central St Martins College of Art and Design. From 1992/02 she was the BA Fine Art Programme Leader at Middlesex University where she is a Senior Lecturer on the BA Fine Art Programme.
