KATE
WICKER WOMAN SHOOTER
Solo Cardiff17.09.22Exhibition-22.10.22MadeGallery CATALOGUE OF WORKS
WICKER WOMAN KATE SHOOTER
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.
Artist’s Statement
The release in allowing deep buried shit to bubble to the surface. The wonder at figuring out something through the work about yourself you never knew before, like a Jungian decoding of dreams. The beauty of accident and our connection to everything.
I love, living in a 1970’s bungalow off an A Road in South Wales. Suburban misogyny, boredom, magic, nihilism and compassion. The comfort and horror of the domestic landscape and the subversion of the familiar like a word repeated over and over that begins to lose its meaning.
Being a menopausal, depressive, bisexual, mother married to a man
Kate Shooter
This work is about painting. The materiality of paint.
MADE gallery is thrilled to present ‘Wicker Woman’, a new body of work by Kate Shooter, as joint winner of the 2021 MADE Solo Art prize along with Ellie Young, whose sister exhibition ‘I Want to Believe’ was exhibited at MADE Gallery in July, 2022.
Gallery Foreward
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.
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 Thesegenerosity.motifs
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like a family of works; recognisable traits appear and reappear in different guises. The paintings build collectively to articulate the bigger picture, as 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.
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, Gallery
Curator
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.
Time is a Mother
Acrylic, oil pastel, soft pastel and spray paint on linen. 100 x 100cm
Acrylic, oil pastel, pastel and spray paint on linen. x
Valium (In a Blue Dress)
soft
120
100cm
Wide Open
Acrylic, oil pastel, soft pastel and spray paint on linen. 83 x 83cm
oil pastel, oil stick and coloured pencil on birch ply. 52 x 64cm
Vessel
Acrylic,
Oil pastel and spray paint on 300gsm paper cut out. 17 x 18cm
Nest
Fledgling
Oil pastel and spray paint on 300gsm paper cut out. 25 x 29.5cm
Snake in the Grass
Acrylic and house paint on linen. 80 x 54cm
Fuckface Acrylic, oil pastel, house paint and spray paint on birch ply. 48 x 48cm
Acrylic, oil pastel, paper and coloured pencil on birch ply. 48 x 48cm
Space For No Words
Same Haircut All Her Life
Acrylic, oil pastel, charcoal and coloured pencil on birch ply. 48 x 48cm
Swimwear Acrylic, oil pastel and charcoal on pastel paper. 40 x 31cm
Flag Acrylic, oil pastel and charcoal on pastel paper. 32 x 24cm
Jingo Bingo (Pink)
Oil pastel and house paint on 300gsm paper. 60 x 50cm
Jingo Bingo (Green)
Oil pastel and house paint on 300gsm paper. 59 x 49cm
Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
1 4 2 5 3 6
6 Spill
2 Endings
Oil stick, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
3 Plunge
Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
4 Mask
Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
1 Witch
5 Peepers
12 Ghost
9 12 8 11 7 10
7 Bird
Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
9 Lipstick
Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
10 Ancient
11 Lump
Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
8 Birthday
Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on linen. 33 x 33cm.
Moon Cup
Acrylic, paper, oil stick, oil pastel and graphite on linen. 80 x 54cm
Acrylic, paper, oil pastel and charcoal on linen. x 54cm
80
Landing Pad
Wicker Woman Acrylic, oil stick, oil pastel, house paint and spray paint on linen. 94 x 78cm
Vandal Acrylic, oil pastel and spray paint on birch ply. 37 x 34cm
And then there is that face, crudely spray painted on top of the vessel. It’s a brash, bold, brutal defilement. One that announces itself provocatively as if to say, ‘You’ll be seeing more of me.’ And sure enough, faces and bodies will become two of the central motifs in
There are a couple of things I should make clear before we begin: the first is that I’ve always been more of a words than a pictures kind of guy; the second is that Kate Shooter is my Wife. So if you’re expecting an erudite and dispassionate essay that contextualises Kate’s work in the august tradition of Western Art you may, alas, be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you’re curious to discover more about the Wicker Woman paintings and how they came to be from someone who knows Kate better than anyone – and who likes to keep things simple because, well, that’s the only way they know how to write about art – then you’re in luck.
The best way into this body of work, and ‘body’ is a word that we’ll be returning to, is through the first painting Kate made in the series. ‘Vandal’ not only marks the transition from old work to new, it also establishes motifs that will reverberate throughout the show. We see a green vessel in a dark space that has been ‘vandalised’ with a spray painted face. It’s the last time we’ll see such heavy, brooding colours. They were prevalent in the work Kate made over winter, work which was born of the time of year - introspective, quiet, melancholic - but the Wicker Woman paintings were begun in the spring. Kate was keen that the palette for this new series should be ‘joyful, bright and lit from within, almost glowing’; an acknowledgement both of the changing light and the fact that she’d narrowly swerved tumbling into one of the depressive episodes that can dog her over the winter months.
Words On Pictures
the Wicker Woman. Along with tits and cocks. Often the tits and cocks become faces, the faces become masks, and the masks look back at us as we look at them.
Theme.’
During the winter she embarked on a course of therapy for the first time. From this came a number of personal epiphanies which she realises now she was unconsciously exploring as she worked: ‘Of all the work I’ve shown up to this point, this is the most obviously about
So why all the tits and cocks and bodies and vessels and faces? Well, there’s a lot to unpack here, but simply put, this show, more than any other Kate has done, is an exploration of self. Kate describes these paintings as ‘naked making’ in a way that her work hasn’t been before.
vessels – those cups and jars and jugs we often see in the background – can be read as ciphers for the body; more particularly the female body in a domestic space. The breasts stand for woman. In works like ‘Peepers’ and ‘Mask’, as well as the title piece of the show, the breasts become eyes: they look back at us as we look at them. These parts of the body to which women have often been reduced now defiantly return the gaze. We have penises too: a shorthand for masculinity and the patriarchy. While the male organ is prominent in works like ‘Snake in The Grass’ and ‘Birthday’, it has also been given a context that somehow undermines its power: in the former the penis is rendered like snake in a kid’s book and in the latter it’s been plunged into the middle of a birthday cake.
The paintings often dance between the comic and the grotesque. ‘Fuckface’ is a good example. A pair of breasts become eyes, a pink
As part of the process of therapy, Kate has become more accepting and open about her bisexuality. If you are in a long term monogamous relationship – and dear reader, I have every reason to assure you that for Kate this is the case – it’s a sexual orientation that is inevitably out of view. And this sense of an identity that is beyond easy categorisation is palpable in many of the paintings. Not everything can be reduced to tits and cocks.
penis a nose and the face is completed with a kind of inverted rainbow smile. It’s a face that is friendly but leering; it’s happy but there’s also something dangerous about it. Seen collectively these faces on the walls of the gallery are like a series of masks. They make us feel uncomfortable because they are only ever representations of faces – they are inscrutable; the real self is concealed. So while this show might be the one in which Kate has revealed more of herself than ever before, something still remains unknown and unseen.
I’d like to pause at this point and make something clear: the works in Wicker Woman did not have their genesis in a predetermined agenda. The meanings we’ve begun to explore are, I think, legitimate but they were not at the forefront of Kate’s mind when she was in her studio. Kate paints instinctively. It’s only afterwards that the resonances and implications make themselves known: ‘Sometimes I feel my paintings are more intelligent than I am. They’ve also done a job that I couldn’t consciously do.’
The only thing Kate knows at the outset is roughly what her palette will be. She often begins with dry materials, setting down oil pastels on the canvas or wood. These are obscured with acrylics. She works
Richard Holman, August 2022
intuitively and at speed. Then she will begin to scratch back the paint, explore composition and form, until eventually, ‘the painting finds Thereitself.’ are works of all sizes in this show. The largest canvases, among the biggest Kate has ever painted, are ‘Time is a Mother’ and ‘Valium (In a Blue Dress)’. They’re the most abstract of the paintings and the ones in which we see that ‘glowing’ palette most vividly realised. The twelve works arranged in four rows of three behave like a game of exquisite corpse: heads at the top and body parts beneath. If you’re anything like me you’ll probably have felt an urge to experiment with rearranging them. There are the ‘Jingo Bingo’ drawings, oil pastel on paper, as if Kate has revealed the skeletons on which her other paintings rest. And then there are those free-floating remnants of collage, ‘Fledging’ and ‘Nest’, which somehow have escaped the confines of a painting altogether.
Someone once said that writing about Art is like dancing about Architecture. I’ve done my very best to dance around these paintings. Let’s finish on more certain ground and that is with the title of the show: ‘Wicker Woman’. ‘Wicker’ suggests a material that is both pliable and easily broken, and in giving you the viewer a gaze deep into her psyche, Kate is making her herself both visible and vulnerable. ‘Wicker Woman’ is a subversion of the pagan figure of the ‘Wicker Man’ and carries connotations of witchcraft and a world beyond reason . . . a world beyond words.
Acknowledgements
Josh and Zoë
Finally to Cerys and Hannah, and all who champion, enable and ensure that the Arts are present in daily life, a big Thankyou.
Cardiff M.A.D.E. would like to thank Kate Shooter for her professionalism as well as her brilliance. For grabbing this chance to throw it all up in the air and see where it lands, with so much grace, courage and care.
Dave at Beacon Printers for his patience invested, and extra thanks to Anthony Shapland, Jennifer Dudley and Lucia Jones for their time in supporting the assessment of candidates for the 2021 Solo Art Exhibition Award.
Huge thanks as ever to all those within the local community who continue to support Cardiff Made in the fertile endeavour to build this platform celebrating the many creative voices focused within this city we Specialshare.thanks go to Richard Holman for his contribution and Thanksperspective.alsoto
17.09.22 - 22.10.22 CARDIFF MADE www.cardiffmade.comGALLERY
