Biography

Kate Southworth is an Irish/British artist based in Cornwall whose work engages with magic, alchemy, mysticism and spirituality and which emerges from a shrouded, hidden place.

Her work indexes the soul painting its own transformation.

Each work emerges as a cluster of fragments: paintings, drawings, rituals, spells, texts that often exist in different places and different times to each other. Some elements may lay fallow for several years.

The forms in her work reference relationality, alchemical transformation, the sun, the moon, pregnancy, wombs, placentas, birth, living and dying.

Her work has been disseminated nationally and internationally. In addition to solo and two-person shows, it has been included in more than 37 group exhibitions including The Order of the Sun and Moon at The College of Psychic Studies, London, Craftivism at Arnolfini, Bristol, and is archived in online collections.  She was quoted extensively in Vox magazine’s 2022 article on ‘Why we need rituals, not routines’ and her work was featured in Interalia magazine’s issue on Alchemy, Occult and Esoteric Art Practices - ‘Ritual Forms and Transformation’. She was interviewed about her paintings, rituals, politics, network forms and calendric practices by Marc Garrett for the Furtherfield Podcast.

She currently teaches at St Ives School of Painting, Cornwall. She has taught at Universities in London, Dublin and Cornwall and has given talks on contemporary art at Tate St.Ives, Tate Britain and Tate Modern.

She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Manchester Polytechnic, and went on to complete an MSc with Distinction in Multimedia Systems at the London Guildhall University. She earned a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds, where her supervisors were the artist, Chris Taylor and art theorist, Griselda Pollock.