Kate Howe (they/them) b.1971, is an American artist and writer currently living and working in London where they are pursuing a Ph.D. with Leeds University entitled "Collecting Rape: Identification, Collation, Curation and Response to every item in the National Gallery and Archives that takes Rape as its subject.” Howe holds an MA (distinction) from the Royal College of Art (‘22) in painting, a BA (summa cum laude) from Arizona State Univeristy (‘20) and will graduate in August 24 with an MA in writing from Kingston University.

The subject of my research proposal is one I have always felt passionately about, and though in the past I have often tried to pull away from it, my work is always connected to violence against women and the political and social dynamics of sex as a means of power and control over women's bodies.

I knew as I approached the subject of collecting Rape in art, and as I sat in front of exquisite images of rape in the National Gallery, that there was a lifetime of work to do here because my experience of this dissonance is not unique. Stories of Rape pervade society, are weapons of war, and are presented as beauty in art: they are instructional, and they help define gendered social positions, and hide the dangers inherent to those positions.

My practice responds to research questions via the vigorous production of work across many disciplines. Each question produces responses that often start with paintings, and expand to include site-specific installations, performances, socially collaborative performances, sound pieces, readings, tattooing, templums and texts.

I am curious: how will the vocabulary of my practice change as it becomes saturated with images of violence against women, as it sites itself for a time from within the lexicography of Rape culture? How will my generative impulse respond to the steady diet of Rape related items in the collection? What will happen to my mark making, composition, subject, and form as these sources perfuse and permeate my practice – an accidental accent, some slang, a stubborn refusal? – a new generative lexicon.

My work begins at the source: my own body and mind crisscrossed with the scars of surgeries from traumatic and idiopathic tear-and-repair. From this position, all bodies are riven and sutured: bodies of thought, political bodies, bodies of identity, bodies of knowledge, geographical bodies, bodies of faith and community bodies all are pulled apart and pulled back together continuously. Every rending demands a repair, every repair leaves a mark, every mark informs the future, in every future, inevitably, the rending occurs again.

In the suspended moment between the rending and the pulling, the Templums arise like punctuations in my practice, like a gasp for air. They arise as a space for gathering, considering, laying down of arms, biases, prejudices. They are a place to consider a world in which we cease to oppress each other. A temple of contemplation, a space in which geologic time opens: an openness to large thought to have a thought all your own, perhaps other than one you have been instructed to hold as a truth.  
 



Running through all my work are the seams of things being healed from rupture, the scar of having been brought back together, pregnant and uneven, forever imprinted with what came before. My work looks primarily at ways to expose
these rending/suturing impulses, and provide moments of opportunity for these patterns of behaviour to change: for the story to go a different way.