WHAT IS WOMAN?
“I’m a gender-fluid person, the vehicle of my consciousness is gendered female; I’m the queer mother of two transgender women. I grew up believing in the power of Lolita and thinking “feminist” was something you called a dried-up, unmarriageable harpie. I participated in benevolent sexism, was a fan of Tom Jones, and trusted the power of the patriarchy without question.
After studying Sociology, Art History, and Feminist Art History at Arizona State University, I gained a dawning understanding of the baked-in bias of patriarchal power structures that permeate all societal hierarchies. Since that time, I have challenged this norm wherever I find it, reckoned with my own practice’s need to address the interminable and exhausting struggle, and found a way to say what matters to me, while simultaneously letting go into the work.
I suppose you might say I had an awakening. I woke up. Does that, then, make me woke? Hijacked words turned against us the moment we gain a foothold; that’s how slippage occurs. That’s a neat little circle drawn for anyone to fall into. The drug wore off, and I saw behind the curtain. And now I understand what the curtain is. I understand that “educated elites” are vilified for precisely this reason. I understand that women's access to education is terrifying to many; what would happen if all subjugated peoples awakened? I don’t think we all need to feel the same way or think the same way or hold the same beliefs.
But I insist that we do not have to subjugate each other on any basis: gendered or otherwise, and that this idea should not be available only through higher education but that it should be baked into the mandate of power: don’t step on someone else as you reach for the top shelf. Just ask for a boost, or get a stool. Humans aren’t for climbing over.”
- Kate Howe
Moving Target: a diagram of instructions the artist has received on how to “be a woman” over the years.
Sitting in the back yard of Turner’s house, Sandycoomb Lodge during lockdown.
Read the dissertation here.
Turner
Turner’s painting “Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth,” first exhibited in 1842 and now at Tate Britain, captures the introduction of the mechanization and speed which would shortly touch every aspect of life.
We are sucked into the vortex of the storm and we can see three things: a sail–or a series of signal flares, a smokestack with its plume of beautiful pollution, and the endless, raging sea. The ship (s?) are too far away to hail. The modern world is steaming ahead, speeding up, and we can not stop what has begun.
Turner captures the genesis of the accelerated and globalized world we live in today.
Simultaneously, Turner took away our horizon, our point of reference, and therefore our feeling of agency as a viewer. We are in the sea, bobbing up and down, tossed by the snowstorm raging.
The more I engage with this painting the more I feel like I am painting a letter to Turner from the future and all of the marks are moments where we traveled back and forth to each other, trying to send messages.
COVID and Brexit have shown what happens when global supply chains, sped up by the introduction of steam, are disrupted. Not only is your can of Cheeze-Whiz from Amazon now going to take three weeks to arrive, your vaccines may be delayed as well.
The pandemic has shown how instantly and incredibly mobile humans have become. During the outbreak, a commercial flight docked at the ISS while our family moved to London for school. The world is so fast and so small that the virus is not stopped by oceans, deserts or mountains - it has found its way to every corner of the globe. The world is so fast and small that an angry mob can arrange an attempted coup online.
There is beauty here as well... there are deep relationships and miracles of science (A vaccine in ten months! Autopilot to ISS! My growing changing strong relationship with my amazing family! The return of letter writing! Long-distance friendships! “Staged” with David Tennant and Michael Sheen...) the world is remaking itself again.
This is another moment of collision, an epoch.
I’ve always believed in going to the source and working forward when something catches my interest and swallows me whole. Recently, my partner pointed out that this is also the method I use to live my life. We call it the Knowledge Ball. When something catches my attention, I scrabble around the surface until I get some purchase. Then I pry and dig until I find a slippery hole into its origins, and I begin again, tunneling with a myopic purpose.
Since the Turner project, I’ve realized I conduct my research the same way as everything. I think about my work and research the same way I would about a lover. I would never google a lover. I’m not interested in what is resting on the top of the public consciousness or the curated image imprinted into the immovable Truth of History. No. I would not google a lover; it would only show me what is already known. I want to reach into what is left, the unsifted detritus, and see if there is a message in a bottle, something history has glossed over. A trip to the Source is an adventure of roughness and excavation.
Research in this manner includes the inherent risk of super-intimacy, the erotic charge of reaching into the unknown. Whether in response to Turner, or Susanna, or Eiko, my research is the vehicle of touch: revealing the living, still-to-be-exhumed historical body to me slowly, deliciously, over time.
Research in-situ. Photo: Kate Howe
RULES OF THE GAME
I am a Holistic Researcher / Detective in the mold of Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently. I follow the clues I’m not looking for as they appear in my world, trusting, as I recognize them as clues and choose to follow them, that they will lead to a deeper understanding.
I suspend disbelief in order to play the game. Why not believe there are parallel timelines? My studio is a space created every morning by the unreality of the thinness of the time-space continuum, which happens to exist in Hampton Wick. Maybe no one discovered it before now because it took the strain of COVID to change our perception enough to see, feel, believe and experience it. Follow the looping footnotes into oblivion; research can lead you anywhere. I followed it through a tear it created in reality and decided this was true.
Research is a troll through that which has survived. It can be a crutch, and a lie, a way to feel secure in a world that demands rigor and breadcrumbs. Churning through the footholds of history, fallacies written by the victor, I search for that which has been erased rather than that which is written as fact and resurrect.
Turner painted here. Taken with my iPhone during lockdown research. What is lockdown research? Going on a stomp with the Bonds.