ABOUT
SEE KATE’S WORK:
In person by appointment at RuptureXIBIT, London, or by drop-in at True House, London and Red Studios, Wimbeldon.
Read, listen at look at Howe's text-based work at their SubStack.
See new work at RuptureXIBIT, London during the Richmond Arts and Ideas festival 14-27 June 2025.
Howe (1971, American) is an artist, writer and post-graduate researcher at the University of Leeds where they are pursuing a Ph.D. in Practice-led research entitled Collecting Rape: Collation, Curation and Response to every item in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Archives that takes Rape as its subject.
Howe holds an MA from Kingston University in Creative Writing, an MA from the Royal College of Art in Painting, a BA from Arizona State University in Art History and an AA in Technical Theatre from Foothill College, California.
Kate Howe is an interdisciplinary artist with a research-led practice whose work examines the socialization of violence against women with art as the mediating factor, questioning the impact these objects have in forming contemporary social norms. Howe works in painting, installation, performance, social performance, writing, theatre, text and storytelling, creating moments that reframe historical violence. Their work folds time to figure a future in which we feel comfortable stepping outside our implicit biases and cease subjugating each other.
STATEMENT
My work arises in response to historical artworks which take gendered violence as their theme, and form the response portion of my current practice-led PhD research, which I am undertaking at the University of Leeds. 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.
I work with scenes of gendered violence found in evidentiary crime scene photos, described from victim impact statements, my memory, or taken from popular culture entertainment - television shows and films in which the inciting incident is the capture-and-kill of a woman. I engage with her ghostly form, her most violent moment, the moment where her identity becomes enmeshed in her end, and free her from that misalignment and identification of self with that final and violent act.
Often cribbing the language of the Baroque, I build work in layers: patching, performing, sewing, writing, pouring, scraping, varnishing, until she is atomized and freed from that moment and back into time - back into the fuller life she lived, the things that define her as a person, a human.