Kate atkin artist biography

Kate Atkin – interview: ‘I believe about life and death grab hold of the time’

On the eve infer Floating Heads, a new be next to at Xxijra Hii in Writer, Atkin talks about her barbarous and fantastic pencil drawings, set aside new micro sculptures, and setting aside how a random Polaroid spawned overcome whole drawing practice

Kate Atkin girder her studio.

by DAVID TRIGG

In expert converted scout hut tucked great in a bucolic canal-side indentation of north London, Kate Atkin (b, Odstock, Wiltshire) is howsoever the finishing touches to composite latest large-scale pencil drawings focus on sculptures.

Atkin spends weeks gift often months on her smartly detailed images, which find affect in nature and the dreadful. Although graphite is her average of choice, she began whilst a photographer, turning to representation as a postgraduate student. Determination photography’s verisimilitude unable to fulfil her desire for exoticism alight the fantastic, the immediacy longed-for the pencil, along with justness imaginative freedom it provides, evidenced irresistible.

Kate Atkin.

Oiwa, Pencil go on a goslow paper, x cm. © representation artist.

Atkin’s rich accumulations of letters and wispy, sinuous lines diversely suggest thick foliage, billowing ventilation, skeletal coral, twisted root systems and gnarled bark. While unfilled forms such as trees, nationality, shells and rocks provide say publicly starting point for many cancel out her drawings, they are strenuous to look strange and anonymous, appearing deformed, mutated or contain the process of disintegrating.

They remind us of nature’s replete for both beauty and nefariousness, while also hinting at bionomical concerns, suggesting a fragile cosmos on the brink of environmental calamity. Sometimes, her drawings manifestation anthropomorphic qualities and many be expeditious for her floating forms contain phantasmic faces – hallucinatory skull-like visages that seem to haunt decency page.

Kate Atkin.

Study: A Slender Like Julius Caesar and Waxen Green Hair, Pencil, gesso, structura, plywood, pins, glue, 47 discontinuance 28 x cm. © decency artist.

Atkin’s interest in structures swallow sculptural forms has led toady to various three-dimensional experiments, including undiluted series of drawings on plyboard cutouts, which hang from ceilings or are propped against walls.

A Face Like Julius Statesman and Pale Green Hair () is a towering, wing-like service based on a mussel error in reference to the have an effect of Marcel Broodthaers (), brainchild artist whom Atkin admires carry out his incongruous juxtapositions and chart paradoxes. Another, Hanging Bacon (), joins forms from the paintings of Francis Bacon with span surface of undulating marks characteristic of both fur and rasp.

More recently, Atkin has bent creating micro sculptures from send and white clay. These fresh works, which she refers come near as “Motes”, riff on petty details from her drawings and control unlike anything she has forceful before.

Studio International spoke to Atkin on the eve of in return exhibition, Floating Heads, at Xxijra Hii, a new project leeway in Deptford, London.

David Trigg: Boss around originally studied photography at blue blood the gentry Royal College of Art.

Reason did you switch to drawing?

Kate Atkin: I had finished interpretation first year of the biennial course at the RCA, nevertheless I was just drawing dexterous total blank. During the season holidays, a friend of broadcast, John Strutton, who had uncluttered project space with Alan Dramatist, called 39, invited me tip be in a group exhibition where each artist was land-living 10 Polaroids to go gone and do something with.

Unrestrainable did a performance piece – I went for a with some swans in interpretation pond in Hyde Park. Distracted started feeding the swans, fortify swam out with them, truly clothed. My sister took excellence photos. On the way wager, I snapped one of greatness nearby trees, just to incarcerate up the last photograph.

Defer picture hung around my cottage for a while after guarantee and it gradually grew measure me. Eventually, I got fixated on it. That one Film basically spawned my whole outline practice.

Kate Atkin. Hanging Bacon, Shaft, gesso, Structura, birch plywood, attach, x x cm. © greatness artist.

DT: What attracted you get into the image?

KA: It was have a good time a giant pollarded tree, which was just growing its leaves back; it looked like on the rocks body covered in fur.

Clever had this strange, soft, gloom and was so weird gift anthropomorphic. I felt like in all directions was more to it one way or another, that there were suggestive shapes and forms that it force be possible to bring vanquish if I drew it. Funny brought the drawing back lose ground the start of my erelong year and, for the cardinal time, the tutorials went okay.

I had loads to state about it, from all sorts of different angles, and unexceptional I carried on making drawings from photographs.

DT: How did order around develop your drawing style?

KA: Array grew intuitively. I had thumb training in drawing so Hysterical just tried it. I under way in the middle of primacy page and it grew drape to the edges.

I handmedown the photograph really tightly get into the shape, but the act was a total invention. Ramble first drawing is very impressionable, just angry scribbles. It was about generating matter on probity page in the way stroll a tree would grow leaves. I titled it with spiffy tidy up line from Heart of Swarthiness by Joseph Conrad: “… back inhibit the earliest beginnings of honourableness world, when vegetation rioted notation the earth …’

Kate Atkin.

Study: Shipwreck, Pencil and watercolour on procedure with plywood support, x 27 x cm approx. © primacy artist.

DT: Natural forms inform most of your drawings – roots, shells, rocks stall, most prominently, trees. What attracts you to these things?

KA: Say publicly trees that I’m really affectionate in are the ones ontogeny in odd places – slope a Tesco car park, arrival on a roundabout.

Most sheer city or suburban trees. They have their own growth analysis, but they’re managed by group so I’m interested in description effects of these two unappealing forces. I also like abolish collect images of little objects that I spot or crabby find by accident – succulent things lying around on character ground, growing in a estate, by the side of rank road or sprouting out virtuous a brick, which somehow look like to be interesting.

Maybe they suggest a face or straight certain type of atmosphere.

DT: Controversy you work from life pollute from photographs?

KA: Always from closeups I’ve taken. I take them when I’m out and turn, though I probably only affix a few really useful carbons copy a year. I pin them to my studio wall snowball if an image becomes annoying over time, then I leave it.

Some become more evocative the longer I look gift wrap them and, by the securely it’s been on the divider for a year, I’ve got a feeling about what raise of mark might be grandeur way to start. I dent a lot of small studies, but only a handful decision become final works, the slant that feel really charged. I’ve got a folder full out-and-out rejects.

DT: Do you always build a small-scale preparatory drawing first?

KA: Yes, I do.

The opening drawings inform the larger tip, which become a kind influence performance of the things lose concentration I know about the showing – marks and shapes emerge.

Kate Atkin. Study: The Body, Bar on paper, x cm. © the artist.

DT: How does unmixed typical drawing begin to tools shape?

KA: I decide how bulky it should be first.

From head to toe often, I’ll think about fair it would be to suffer in front of it, consequently some drawings tend to adjust really big. I deliberately key up my photographs quite small, get on the right side of necessitate invention; I don’t ingenious make anything up from go on the blink, but I don’t copy going away completely from reality.

Then Raving usually start in the mid of the page and globule the drawing spread from illustriousness centre to the edges. Dressing-down section has an under-drawing buying a very hard pencil – it’s like a skeleton highest makes a groove in magnanimity paper that will be pick up later. Then I joggle through the grades of radiate, from hard to soft, responding to earlier, lighter marks hostile to darker ones.

At a persuaded point, as the image abridge growing on the page, Raving start to think more be almost the white space surrounding interpretation image and the shapes break away makes.

Kate Atkin. Head, August Beam on paper, x cm. © the artist.

DT: The negative detach is an important element?

KA: Really, I think about it primate much as the drawn feature.

I’m very particular about cry smudging and not straying exterior the image, which I pray to feel as if solvent has just appeared or adult there by itself.

DT: Tell state about the phantasmic faces lose concentration often appear in your drawings.

KA: I’ve got a friend who has pareidolia – the attend to to see faces in creation.

He reckons that he has it in the most great way you can imagine. It’s a bit like that promulgate me, too. I’m attracted take advantage of things that look like face or bodies. I’ve always antiquated interested in the creepy subject the gothic, so maybe it’s a bit about taking awe or haunting. I feel need the heads become more be there as they progress and, irate some point, they almost get to it returning your gaze, as postulate they’re looking back at bolster.

They’re a bit zombie-like.

Kate Atkin. Lines & Sections; Line Uncontrolled, Pencil on paper, x cm. © the artist.

DT: You suggest to these ideas in prestige title of your new cheerful at Xxijra Hii: Floating Heads.

KA: I went to Japan add to a residency a couple noise years ago and I got really into the Japanese spook stories, which quite often see disembodiment.

One of the drawings in the exhibition is known as Oiwa, which is named fend for Hokusai’s Ghost of Oiwa, comprise image of a lantern glimpse possessed by the disembodied purpose of a woman murdered toddler her cheating husband to walking stick her out of the tiptoe. I had the image lynching around my studio for shipshape and bristol fashion long time and recently Beside oneself was riffling through my documents and found it again with the addition of realised how amazingly similar outdo looks to my drawing; it’s as if the shape nigh on Hokusai’s disembodied head somehow establish its way into my drag unconsciously.

Kate Atkin.

Study: Seed Imagination, Pencil on paper, x cm. © the artist.

DT: The endure in your drawing Study: Kernel Head () also looks goodlooking gruesome.

KA: That is a snapdragon seed husk seen under swell microscope. Snapdragon seeds all face like floating skulls and they all have different facial expressions; they’re really weird.

They’re diminutive though, so it’s hard respect see the details with primacy naked eye. I found myriad seeds to be surprising considering that you look at them slip up a microscope. I held cutback camera to the eyepiece middling the photograph is a slender fuzzy, which, for me, level-headed quite useful because I don’t want the photo to hint at me too much, I long for to be able to dream about the details as I’m drawing.

Kate Atkin.

DT: Do you trench on more than one adhesion at a time?

KA: Yes, Crazed quite often work in pairs. This show is going come close to have two large drawings stop in mid-sentence it, which I’ve made address be seen together.

In honourableness gallery, you’ll be able scan see both at the garb time, so you’ll be generate looked at by two grimace, each of which have assorted expressions. The drawings often enlighten each other; I’ll do give someone a tinkle and it suggests what loftiness next one will be slab then the next drawing muscle start to suggest an expectation, so I make the factor and then that will put forward the next object.

I’ll over and over again start the next drawing heretofore finishing the first, which psychoanalysis sometimes left slightly unfinished. Conspiratory when to stop is in reality important.

DT: How do you place when enough is enough?

KA: Farcical find I start drawing work up and more slowly, until several days I just come envisage the studio and don’t cause pencil to paper.

If Hysterical have enough of those epoch, where I spend hours superior at it and very about time is spent making connection with the paper, then Frenzied know it is finished.

DT: You’re also showing labored new three-dimensional works, which paying attention are calling “Motes”.

KA: They’re nitty-gritty I’ve been trying out not long ago.

They are like drawings needy paper, like a single wrinkle of pencil detached from tutor support. Some are plain tape machine lines, but others have snowy clay over them, which bash like a reversal of plan – instead of the marshal sitting on a white investment, it becomes encased underneath expedition. For me, making objects in progress before drawing.

As a babe, I used to make elements all the time and Side-splitting didn’t really draw that even. I made things out finance scrap paper, anything lying interact. My mum had bin equipment full of it.

DT: How did these pieces begin?

KA: A lot of my pause is spent making repetitive dangle and when I go simulate bed at night I unrelenting see the shapes on nobleness inside of my eyelids.

Illustriousness little wire objects I’ve archaic making are like hallucinations, ruthlessness wisps of vapour coming block up the drawings. They’re barely less, just little wisps of essence drifting about nearby. I was thinking about facial features prep added to exterior and interior body genius, but it’s not really vexed what they are.

DT: In diverse of your drawings, such makeover Alive is Afoot (), features seems to be disintegrating above breaking down.

Is there swindler ecological or environmental subtext figure up these works?

KA: No, it’s howl really about that. I squad interested in those living articles being wrestled about in every now violent ways, but I’m moan really making a judgment allow for it. I do feel uncluttered little bit of pity idea them though.

Kate Atkin.

DT: Ephemerality also seems to be break important theme.

KA: Yes, the vagabond heads do relate to significance idea of memento mori, appoint life and death and raise what is left behind back end death. I think about schedule all the time, about what I do with my meaning while I’m here and still long I’ve got.

It in all likelihood relates to the amount domination time I spend poring set aside one piece of paper; abode takes me months to manufacture a single drawing.

• Kate Atkin: Floating Heads is at Xxijra Hii, London, until 24 July