ABOUT
Kate Howe (they/them) b.1971, is an American artist and writer currently living and working in London where they are perusing 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.
STATEMENT
For the last four years, the preoccupation of my practice has been the character of Susanna from the dark apocryphal story Susanna and the Elders. Through research into the story itself and its sociological functions, alongside deep research into the thousands of objects related to this story produced between 1250 – 1850 in Europe, images began to accumulate on my studio wall. Eventually, there were over a hundred images of this same woman being attacked: a serial assault, passed down through the ages. Rubens, Artemisia, Titian. Everyone.
Having survived a serious six-year illness and regained health in April 2023, I rest as hard as I work: spy novels and cop dramas. Slow Horses, Killing Eve, Bosch. This break-and-enter serial crime as the resting hum of my life feeds my practice on the research side: my research is detective work.
I was beginning to look at Susanna as the oldest ever cold-case crime scene, and so turned a forensic lens on the purpose and function of the socialization of images of rape via institutional collection and display. I am working on a research project entitled Collecting Rape: Collation, Curation and Response to every item in the Victoria and Albert Museum & Archives which takes Rape as its Subject.
My paintings begin with an image of rape or its aftermath which must be true, unlike glorious depictions of Susanna, Europa or the Sabine. Painted on sutured Belgian linen, the image traverses an already scarred and altered surface from its very inception. The intitial impulse comes from a lived memory, the mass media, or an evidentiary crime scene photo. Alphonse Bertillon’s seminal forensic monograph, created in Paris from 1893-1912 during the existential threat and presumed ‘death of painting’ due to the advent of photography currently drives the initial work.
As the paintings come into being, they are sutured together with marks observed from Rubens’ soldiery triumphantly returning from war, Titian’s Europa dramatically waving her scarf, a lexicography of rape and rape-adjacent activities knitting the initiating image into the living narrative of the silent majority. Form attempts to coalesce, but ultimately the image is unstable: overwritten, unresolvable, lost in a sea of stories just like it, and yet leaving an imprint all its own.
