About
Artist Statement
My work gives form to psyche’s transformation; inviting subtle presences and unseen dimensions into material expression.Drawing on parsemage, planchette work, dream-based methods, and somatic listening, I attend to thresholds between conscious and unconscious registers. Herbs such as mugwort, valerian, and yarrow serve as ritual companions, opening passageways into imaginal and otherworld realms.
Paintings develop through encounters with liminal space and felt energy. Some arise as raw, intuitive forms or nascent patterns; others articulate symbolic terrains through geometry or cosmic landscape. Certain works function as interfaces: orienting fragments into temporary constellations.
My work unfolds as a cosmology: an evolving field where fragments, images, rituals, and texts circulate and co-transform. These fragments gather in provisional constellations that take form through exhibitions, events, books, and an unfolding digital space. Informed by feminist reconfigurations of alchemy and distributed systems, my practice resists fixed stages or conclusions. It sustains a mutable field of enquiry through which the soul experiences its own transformation.
Artist Biography
Kate Southworth is an Irish-British artist based in St Ives. Her work unfolds as a cosmology that interweaves painting, drawing, ritual, and symbolic enquiry. Rooted in co-creation with veiled beings, herbs, and cosmic landscapes, she invites aspects of the sensed unseen into fragile form.
Working across conscious, unconscious, and subtle registers, she draws on receptive methods such as parsemage, planchette work, and dream-based practices. Her paintings emerge through elemental processes, often hovering between appearance and dissolution. She positions painting as a field of becoming—where material and spiritual processes co-emerge and the soul traces its own transformation. Fragments gather into provisional constellations that evolve across exhibitions, books, talks, courses, and events.
Her work is supported by practice-based research, including a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds, and has been presented nationally and internationally. She has delivered talks at Tate St Ives, Tate Modern, and Tate Britain.
Glorious Ninth (2001–2011)
Between 2001 and 2011, Kate Southworth collaborated closely with the late Patrick Simons under the name Glorious Ninth. Together they explored ritual, magic, painting, sound, and digital art, blending new media and traditional practices in experimental, deeply personal ways. Their work engaged with themes from the politics of digital networks to the traumas of death and the joys of everyday life.
Some early works now exist only in transformed formats due to technology changes. From 2004, their work expanded to include everyday life and communal practices involving painting, music, rituals, bread-making, gardening, and gatherings.
The partnership ended with Patrick Simons’ death in 2011. Their shared work is recognized nationally and internationally and preserved in online archives.
For more information about Glorious Ninth, please see Glorious Ninth