Kate Young (born 1963) is an artist whose interest in the environment both shapes her choice of media and informs the themes of her art. Kate says, "My work takes mass produced material and re-makes it into a very traditional form of art - symbolic landscape painting. In doing so it makes comment on how our relationship with the countryside is, for many, an idealised fantasy."
Kate was educated at John Cass School of Art in East London , and Central St Martin's College of Art and Design where she specialised in print making and photomedia. Kate has historically worked with mixed media, with a love of etching, painting and drawing. Her development of new working methods was born of a desire to recycle the material constantly accumulating around her, rather than simply adding to that accumulation with more new things.
Kate's current approach began with the creation of simple, abstracted pieces which used the tone and colour of old newspapers as a substitute for paint. Her work has since developed to combine plain coloured areas and pieces of photographic imagery in collages of brushstroke density. These are then glued onto shallow boxes, made from bits of found timber, which give the works additional weight and depth.
Kate's collages can be seen as a metaphor for the patchwork of our lives. They all feature a single unifying image, which is made up of many parts, each with their own history and associations. Some convey a dream-like quality where familiar faces crop up in surreal or unfamiliar surroundings. Others subtly convey the urban crush in which newspapers are made, and the majority of modern lives lived.
Audio slideshow: A paper patchwork (Guardian Unlimited Jan 2008)
Mark Tran talks to artist Kate Young
EXHIBITIONS
The Union Soho London 2007
Island Arts Studio, London , Solo Show, 2005
Queensway Centre, London , 2000
Hartnell and Co., London , 1997
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