PAPERWORK
“I found the paper as I was finding Susanna. The two came together accidentally, but the collision was unshakable, the paper is now the home of all of the souls of every Susanna I find. And now that I’ve been researching her for a few years, people send me images of Susanna that they find as they travel all over the world. Each one is collected, each one is folded in. If all of the Susanna stories were to happen all at once, the same story told again and in time folded so all occurrences happened simultaneously, surely she would come forth, this multiplicity of Susannas, and she would look like all of us, and we could shuffle aside and offer her something cool to drink as she watched her story change, a new path open. Would she not walk off into the grotty London afternoon, awake and free? Would she be safe? Would we have done enough?
The paper has the sense of skin that is to say it senses like skin does, rustling at the slightest breeze, every crinkle showing a mark of its use, its facility to stay, to keep on. Like Susanna, it keeps going. Aspirational. She’s so fucking optimistic, isn’t she? Starting down that path yet again in yet another painting, another tapestry, a locket hung round the neck of a thirteen year old bride. The paper is the page of a prayer book, a sliver of Susanna, a wrinkle, a fold, a duration a heartbeat a moment a transformation an intake of breath, a glance up, a hope, for just a moment, that it’s possible. It is the suspension of the screaming void, the blankness of fatigue, a warm respite from the hard truth of the subjugated status of more than half the world’s population.
As the work shifts, Susanna has joined the studio. She makes the work, toils alongside us, within me. She works late, gets here early. She’s learned to be a supplicant to the work. She knows this is the only chance we all have. I follow her, and so does the work.”
-Kate Howe
‘Instructions to the other from the Mother’
Kate Howe, 2023, Site-Specific installation at RuptureXIBIT, waxed kraft paper, lights, wire, bin bags.. Collection: Paperwork, Installation, Performance.
Kate Howe, 2023, Site-Specific installation for ‘Light Being’ at Lychee Gallery. Kraft paper and stitching. 6.8m x 3.7m. Hands: Olivia England, Tom Wight. Collection: Paperwork, Installation.
Kate Howe, 2023, kraft paper, aluminum wire, tar, shellac and stitching, Site-specific installation. Collection: Paperwork, Performance.
Kate Howe and Jessica Mardon. 2023, kraft paper, stitching, gold leaf, dust from the cave of the Oracle at Delphi, 15 minute immersive sound piece, 15 minutes of silence. Site for silent hours, readings, performances, discussions, talks and transformations. Variable dimensions, site-specific installation for the Wild Parlour: Alternative Airport at RuptureXIBIT, London. Hands: Sally Minns, Olivia England, Sadie Wight, Tom Wight, Sylvia Flateau, Flo McCarthy, Leon Watts. Collection: Paperwork, Susanna, Installation, Performance.
‘Susanna's howling liver, delivered unto the Organ of Healing’
Kate Howe, 2023, waxed kraft paper, stitching, lights, Divine and Memory Totemics, rocks bones and stones from the river Thames, hand hammered brass bowl, tealights, cushions. Site-specific installation: the Crypt Gallery, St. Pancras. Variable dimensions. Kate Howe, 2023. Hands: Sylvia Flatau, Sadie Wight, Ellen Wight, Tom Wight, Sharon Owenga, Olivia England, Ben Coleman, Guy Shoham. Collection: Paperwork, Susanna, Installation, Performance.
SMALL WORKS AND WORKS ON PAPER
She teaches me endlessly, this skin. Once, at a studio visit, a very beautiful, very intimidating woman asked me how it was to draw on it.
It won't accept pencil, I said, sadly, it just scratches off the wax.
She looked at me, a trifle disappointed.
That's too bad, she said.
After she left, I thought about this encounter. Had I really tried writing on it? Drawing was always resistant to me, or, more accurately, I to it, as I had always considered a drawing to be a map of a method, as opposed to the pins that momentarily hold the wings of the live thing, a lightning bug in a mason jar, a diagram, a possibility, a thought gesture, the marks left in the air as the idea shimmers back into impulse.
Drawing had previously felt like explanation, like exposition, like proof things had been thought through. And though I do think through, I'm not great at showing my work. And I have an abhorrence of making the same image twice. So why draw?
I pulled out my art school box labeled "Drawing" - unopened saved for those desperate "where's a fucking pencil" moments for the last twenty years - and pulled out a soft drawing pencil. Maybe I had been resistant to drawing because I had relegated it to the land of admin and science. Maybe drawing was not the barren land of preparation and planning, but an open-ended expanse of freedom to make marks.
I pressed the softest pencil I could into the waxy, amber surface, and she sighed, and softened, and let herself be imprinted, marked, forever changed.
Why draw? Why not draw is the correct question. Why not draw? On everything with everything all the time everywhere?
