Kate Sweeney

Kate Sweeney

In Conversation with Kate Sweeney (extracts)

An intervention I just knew that being a Mum was going to change everything. And I really wanted that. I wanted to be exhausted, because I never felt exhausted with my practice.

It really is profound to me. I don’t feel like it’s just a thing that was going to happen because there were a lot of times when I thought it wouldn’t happen. And I really didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. But I knew I wasn’t just going to close that book and carry on. So, it’s an intervention that I’ve brought on and I really wanted.

Articulating Difficulties… It’s very hard to it to accept that we have so many feelings about what we’re doing. It’s so primal and so kind of normal and every day… it’s the biggest creative joy, and fun life thing, and challenge, that I’ve ever done. I think that kind of imbalance just makes you very sensitive in the world.

It’s not like an imbalance that has just happened and I’ve gone from one state to another. It’s not being able to always find your bearings.

I don’t want it to feel like blame. It’s just it changes your brain function as you’re always thinking about someone else. Like I said, I really wanted that, but it is a challenge, and then there are the realities of that challenge.

It puts an extra strain on time, but also on the relational aspects of work and life… it puts a strain on that sustained level of thinking and introspection.

Image: Kate Sweeney, Hairbrish, 2020

Not about making space…

It’s not for me about partitioning things off and finding space - the way I used to do it, because it started to feel like I was missing out and ignoring the truth of the world a little bit.

I’m not one of those artists who wants to wake up and paint or make a video for 8 hours. I’ve done that but felt like I’ve been in a cage... As I’ve got older I’ve thought I can’t do this amount of introspection, I’ll actually go mad because I do it all the time. Something’s got to give.

I believe that having a more general, holistic, life-practice is possible for me, and having other responsibilities will only deepen that. I wanted to find out whether that was true, and at the moment it’s harder than I thought it was. It’s just hard.

It’s tied up in feminism as well: that pull between a feminist theory that it’s certain social circumstances that stops us fulfilling our personal or creative aims, or, accepting that these are the things we do and somehow society doesn’t value them in the same way as somebody who is very single minded and creates a life that doesn’t let other things in.

Making work about these things…

Women go through this major cha nge where we become parents… all these new extreme emotions that include negative ones, there’s nowhere to put them. There’s nowhere in creative practice or critical theory… But there is the sense that to become too preoccupied with it is to sort of become not useful.

…Not to take away from the normative… it’s an opportunity to live out some of these things [same-sex parents and adoption] that I think I’m missing in parlance, practice and in creative representations of motherhood of womanhood, and of family life.

I’ve been making an animation that explores the idea of keeping a boundary line and this part of my life private. I’ve been making tools like a brush made of L’s loose hair for the animation. In using these intimate and personal objects you step up close to that boundary line of privacy. When you are a practitioner, whatever the thing that you desire becomes also the thing that you spend most time thinking about. So there’s always a dichotomy. And it’s always a sort of low-level stress, but it’s also the thing that powers what you do, because you become very obsessed with it. There’s a sort of parasitical thing about being a practitioner really… you can’t drop things if they’re on your mind all the time. You just have to find a way to put them through the sieve.

On every level it’s counterintuitive to have babies... It doesn’t add in a sense you can monetize… We owe it to ourselves to articulate why we would want to be parents, it would help, when you’re not sleeping or in despair. I think it gives a lot of parents a hell of a shock when they have a baby and it’s so hard, and there’s no support because the child doesn’t doesn’t fit with the general societies drive, so it becomes internalised.

Maybe it’s to do with unlearning… Time, as a practitioner is something you have to un learn. Don’t ruin what is a gorgeous thing. I’m enjoying thinking about this little poem, don’t ruin it by making it a time-based nightmare.

Kate Sweeney is a visual artist. She often works collaboratively and her videos are collages of drawing, photography, moving image, writing and sound.

Kate and her partner, Phyllis, have a little son who is nearly 2.