Kate Shepherd

‘A whole history remains to be written, of spaces which at the same time would be the history of powers.’ Foucault.

Kate shepherds paintings are a reaction to the immediate urban environment and the ‘collective amnesia’ present in capitalism. Her work is concerned with the city and its patterns of control; formation and reformation and its effect upon memory.

The painting process creates tension between surface and image, perfection and imperfection, indecision and deliberation, abstraction and figuration. Her paintings have a strong sense of perspective and use line and layering to move the eye between invented and un-invented space. Confused visual order enable a different viewing of different elements of the work at various distances. With the introduction of each layer of oil, the paintings begin to form a history of their own. In the painting ‘White Palace’, she uses these oily layers of conflicting colours of paint to mimic the archaeological layers of the cityscape.