Kate Shooter : Wicker Woman

About

"This work is about painting. The materiality of paint. The perversity of finding technique and then turning your back on it. The rejection of sophistication. The knowledge that you are painting yourself no matter how abstract and coolly lost you are in the process."

Kate Shooter, August 2022

Wicker Woman is an exhibition of paintings and drawings which are tender, playful and cheeky; where drawn elements related to body and domestic everyday objects, or vessels ride alongside and over softer painted forms which have bubbled up to challenge, poke fun  and revel in their own alternative landscape. It is playful and brave, absurdist and subversive, within a spirit of  love, humour and generosity.

These motifs re-occur throughout the work invested with a dual character, soft and hard, both adult and childlike to convey a complex and friendly world which is both familiar yet located in the subconscious version of ‘real’, indicative of deep connectedness to her own being – a working out of life, which she shares snippets of which pull you right in, by their visual yet tactile quality. 

The title ‘Wicker Woman’ is a clue to unlocking the work made for this exhibition. The images hover between re-cognizable shape and abstracted forms, coming out through a process similar to automatic drawing, enabling imagery to surface out of the layers of the Artist’s psyche and being, as if stirring the pot of life. 

Both a simultaneous ‘release’ and decoding of the personally resonant, the act of painting reveals subconscious connections between life and image changed into the symbolic via mentally surrendered state, just as one might experience in dreaming. 

Like a family of works; recognisable traits appear and reappear in different guises.  The paintings build collectively to articulate the bigger picture, a sense of a parallel world in which they inhabit. It’s as if they have developed their own means of communication, through a playful, often absurd communal sensibility. It's this ability to listen to what the painting’s language or subtext is that reveals the work’s strength; one of real intimacy and vulnerability. 

Body parts, rude bits, morph into aeroplanes attempting a landing, or a face made of boobs and knobs, sometimes gurning or jeering. These images are reflections of Kate’s own self-navigation, wrestling with life living in a household of males, locating her own  Womaness, as an element which jostles and merges into a composite self. Images like ‘Fuckface’ appear like a childish game, similar to arranging food on a plate to make a face. The comedic value in the visual play of body bits places them outside the context of sexual identity and notions of crudity, allowing the images to acquire the characteristics of evolved personalities.  Beyond notions of shock and politeness surrounding privacy, they present a far more intimate exchange between image, artist and audience. 

Vessel forms rendered through strong drawn marks have been a recurrent motif in Kate’s work, as well as colour as an element itself, a palette arriving through process which distinguishes each series of works. The painterly conversation between soft and hard, line and brush, misty and scratched marks; allows each element a sense of place, acquired through spatial negotiation. 

The depicted forms of vessels, objects, and body parts, are singled out to become visually totemic and powerful, and at the same time revealed as all too human in their vulnerability; with their natures uncovered, and exposed. 

Zoë Gingell, Cardiff MADE curator 

The MADE Solo Art Award was established in 2016 to propel and support the career of artists based in South Wales through the production of a new body of work for exhibition within a year of the award through mentoring and funded studio time. 

Made gallery and the artist recipients Zena Blackwell, Lucia Jones, Ellie Young and Kate Shooter have been supported through production grants from the Arts Council of Wales, and since 2021 through the generous sponsorship of HannaH