Kate Kelly
Statement of Practice
I paint women. Women I know: alive and from the archive creating an ever-expanding space for women, exploring their stories, views and research.
My paintings explore fiction, feminism and autobiographical experience; incorporating aspects of auto-theory and intersectional feminist theory as an ongoing methodology within my research.
I use photography and drawing as a prompt to capture staged and natural moments, combined with my imagination and archival material, I explore when painting women becomes a form of subjective embodiment. I integrate my autobiographical experience with social criticism, using feminist theory to underpin and critically evaluate.
Exploring the female experience through visual and audio representation, integrating elements of subjects' identities through the use of patterns, tattoos and jewellery: the women I represent are active, with a voice and given physical space for their narratives.
Process and materiality are significant. I allow the viewer to see the journey of the painting and the movement of the lines underneath, leaving some areas 'unfinished' while others are more laboured. I create a space for imagining new feminist possibilities to continue.
I integrate biographical experience with social critique, using feminist theory as both a framework and a tool for reflection. My work sits in dialogue with artists such as Alice Neel, Jordan Casteel, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Caroline Walker. Texts such as Self-Portrait by Celia Paul and With Darkness Came Stars by Audrey Flack offer insight into these lived experiences, acting as both reference and point of comparison. While painting, I was also reading Talking to Women by Nell Dunn and Daily Rituals: Women at Work by Mason Currey, which further informed my understanding of the structures, habits, and inconsistencies that shape creative practice.
Through projects such as SURGE III and Women of the NHS, I have developed a range of methodologies grounded in collaboration, observation, and exchange. Across all aspects of my practice, I am concerned with how painting can hold space for complexity—where multiple narratives, temporalities, and experiences remain visible.
For me, re-examining and foregrounding female experience from women’s perspectives remains a necessary and radical act.