Bio

Kate Howe (they/them) b.1971, is an American artist and writer working in London and Leeds, and is currently a doctoral researcher at University of Leeds. Their Ph.D. project is entitled "Collecting Rape: Identification, Collation, Curation and 2 of 4Response to every item in the National Gallery and Archives that takes Rape as its subject.” Howe holds an MA (distinction) from Kingston University ('24) in Creative Writing, an MA from the Royal College of Art (‘22) in painting, and a BA (summa cum laude) from Arizona State Univeristy (‘20). As Howe ecountered Titian’s "The Rape of Eruopa," they saw abduction figured as passion and adoration. This formed their desire to interrogate a major collection and ask, “Just how much rape are we collecting?” Passionate about the origins of the socialization of gendered violence, Howe responds using modern images of rape found in evidentiary collections, victim impact statements, and our contemporary cinematic entertainment. Linen surfaces are sutured before being stretched, sized with rabbit skin glue, and chalked out, utilizing the same process as the Old Masters, until the image begins to fracture, freeing the victim from the prison of the image of her most impactful, and possibly final, moment.

Statement

How can a painting stand still in a moment when all frequencies feel truth as ungraspable? How to look to history, how to create space for knowledge, growth and understanding in the Babel of the global Idiocracy? It is so loud in here. One must tune into every frequency at once as fragmented moments try to resolve into something tangible, only to fall into impotent action again.

There is a point where the work begins to take on this feeling of conditional reality. As though the many realities that are happening as we move through the world are happening all at once, all trying to resolve themselves, but never can.

Rather than ‘the fragment’ it’s more like all the fragments, who once were joined, all trying to reach for each other whilst being pulled apart. The restless, unresolving, relentless movement evokes this conditional reality – akin to trauma memory, or life with ADHD, all possibilities existing at once, none resolving.