Kate Knight

Kate Knight is an artist based in Kent. She studied her BA Fine Art Painting at Chelsea College of Art and design 2005 and was selected as the runner up for the Marmite Prize for Painting 2010 for her painting of a hangman’s noose titled ‘Illuminated’.

Kate works primarily with figurative and object based imagery, aiming to express the aesthetics of desire, sex and death. Descriptive, as well as aiming to recall the memory of the body. The works are provocative, playful, harsh and tongue in cheek. However, this response is bound and loaded in melancholy in a state of waiting, like an inhalation or frozen moment. The composition establishes a series of graphic signs aiming to evoke a narrative whether epic or fleeting.

Her current explorations into watercolour, run alongside her oil painting practice. The crossover began with anatomical studies of the human heart inspired by imagery of the Sacred Heart. These works collectively are suggestive of portraiture and present the heart in a process of death or resurrection. Intertwining and merging these examinations of human anatomy, are depictions of animals. Executed in watercolour and embellished with gold leaf, they give rise to and are suggestive of a gift or token of love. The introduction of gold leaf transports these works to realms of objet d’art, like that of a Faberge egg but it is also steeped in the history of religious works of art. Kate is not interested in the belief of religion itself, but the art of ritual and ceremony that encompasses it.