Kate Shooter, ‘Head (Of A 50 Year Old Woman)’

Kate Shooter studied Fine Art at Howard Gardens Art School in Cardiff and then Wimbledon School of Art in London. Her practice is based in South Wales where she paints in her home studio in the Black Mountains.

Kate is one of Irving Gallery’s gallery artists and has been exhibiting with the gallery since our inaugural exhibition in November 2019.

Your Face Or The Moon

“Painting for me is an act of blind faith. The endless erasing of pitfalls clarified by cliches and alluring noise, to find the thing I don’t know but instinctively recognise all the same. The process is like an archaeological dig in this way -holding my nerve through the dirt and the dust and shiny distracting trinkets until ‘the thing’ is found. I’m searching for the small surprise happenings, the good mistakes, the combined power of ALL the mistakes that lead to the final incarnation. It is a perversely agonising, but necessary stumble through wrongness to find an imperfect rightness.”

“So on the big level and on the little level and every level in-between, the slippage between control and finesse and form and wanting it to be good and constantly adjusting things and between first thought, best thought, let it all hang out, do a thing, see what you’re surprised by… That tension is the tension of me making my work.” (Amy Sillman excerpt from Art21 interview).

Kate Shooter, July 2024