After graduating with her Master’s in Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield, Kate Peel decided to stay in Sheffield. It’s the largest creative community outside of London in the UK and provides Peel with a creative community and exhibition opportunities. Kate has been showing in Sheffield, in the UK and internationally for almost a year now after a break from exhibiting since graduating from her BA in Fine Art in 2011. She studied at Birmingham City University for her BA in Fine Art and discovered her interest in the dynamics and contexts associated with space throughout her work there. Extending this into the social sciences has opened up her practice to new explorations.
Peel’s work contains intricate details while also seeming quite minimalist. Therefore, it pops out and allures you to view the work and think about it more than once rather than walking past. It works to catch your eye and interpret it in your way while also contrasting itself beautifully it allows for reflection on the work itself. Exploring psychological and cultural permutations of space guides the focus of Peel’s practice. When making work Peel thinks about how changing the context of space can relocate it into a new spectrum of reference. Her work is deeply embedded in the appropriation of images and material the artist sees this as recycling of possible meaning that touches on both the personal and the cultural.
Can you tell us a bit about your background and your journey into art?
I started doing band artwork in my early twenties in Manchester. I loved the way I had to find a visual language to portray something as abstract as music and decided to do a Foundation Diploma in Art to explore my creativity further. I discovered a philosophical and cultural critique emerging in my work and decided to continue my studies through a BA in Fine Art in Birmingham. Learning about postmodernism and the history of art changed the world for me. After completing my degree, I wanted to take a break from studying art for a few years and struggled financially. I had some health problems at this time in my life and making work became very challenging. I needed to earn a living and to take a new perspective, so I eventually chose to study MA in Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield, for which I received a scholarship. It was a spatial practice but more technically and ecologically based than Fine Art but seemed interesting. When I finished my MA, I started making work again but the journey I had been on had changed my perspectives since leaving art school.
What education route did you follow whilst mastering your craft?
I initially studied Art at A Level. It was the only A Level I actually finished before dropping out and moving to Bristol at 17. I was a dreamer and had some harsh lessons to learn about life. I returned to my hometown of Wigan, completed my A Levels and set up an art studio in my parent’s garage. My Foundation Diploma in Art was where I really discovered that there was something in me that could be developed. I had always loved drawing, print and collage. I used to love doing proportional line drawings in life class every Friday with classical music playing in the background. University had a predominantly conceptual focus, and I desperately wanted to do print, but unfortunately, the print studios were closed during my first two years at Birmingham. The 2008 financial crisis was starting to bite and everyone was cutting back. I graduated, pleased with my final show but felt that it wasn’t truly reflective of where I was at the time. I needed to find out for myself what ‘where I was’ was. I had some trouble finding opportunities to exhibit my work and my health problems started around this time. After taking a break I reflected on my next steps and decided a reality check was in order. I needed to work. This is when my journey in Landscape Architecture started. It was about looking at and being in space from a scientific and an artistic perspective and lots of drawing. I learned AutoCAD and Sketch Up and the fundamentals of Ecology. When I left Sheffield University, I started to rebuild a new practice. Colour was important and so was discipline. This is when I started my Unnatural World Series.
Can you tell us about any themes recurring through your work?
Journeys, dreams, place, representation, and authorship. I also like to ask open questions about what we consider the ‘real’ and I’m interested to find out how we explore that as artists in a Metamodern context. In each series that I create, I take a different conceptual focus, but each series always has some interplay between the above themes.
How important is the role of colour within your work?
The colour came later for me. I was afraid of it at first. It felt like I couldn’t find a way to explore colour as a graphic language or colour as a way to explore my relationship to the work and achieve ‘a sense of me’ in there. I draw attention to the work with the use of colour but also add layers of meaning and open the work to the viewer to form their own subjective relationship with it. I can’t imagine the work now without colour. It would feel almost too ‘dry’ to me. The colour also allows the work to conceptually engage with Pop Art and the language of the mass media, so it’s become pretty pivotal to the meaning behind the work.
You have a unique style. Is it important for you to have a distinctive artist stamp?
It is. My work has always had a non-traditional approach and I think this comes from the desire to merge and form relationships between different languages while still having a sense of myself in there. A key moment for me doing this in a more realised way was when I talked about feeling pressured as an artist to have an artistic style or approach that made my work more ‘comprehensible’ or ‘palatable’ for people. My Landscape Tutor was also an artist and she said to me that “they try to brand you at Art school”. I thought this was interesting. What denotes something as an ‘official brand’ of art? It raised the question for me of what is art. And why do we care so much? I also thought if anybody is going to brand me, I’ll brand myself. I think that’s where my American Dream series picks up many of its ideas.
You studied Landscape Architecture – how has this impacted your work?
Studying Landscape Architecture focused my mind and got me thinking about taking a more disciplined approach to making work. My mind was very chaotic before I studied Landscape Architecture. I learnt AutoCAD, which is not an intuitive piece of software, and takes a lot of patience and time to learn and use accurately but yields amazing technical drawings if you keep working at it. It also got me thinking about the representation of landscape in different disciplines.
Can you talk us through your process from the initial idea to the final piece?
There are two ways that I work. The first i watching films and TV for pleasure and if something sticks with me over a longer period of time, I know there is something in there that interests me. I start to break it down in my mind and generally don’t work in a sketchbook. The next step is to start drawing film stills digitally in Procreate. Sometimes I just start from the drawing phase and as I continue to draw and trace the images, I change some elements and keep some elements the same. Then I started to get ideas about how the drawings could relate to each other in different ways and my mind started to build an idea for a series out of it. I usually have a few decent series in mind and then by the time I have got around to making them, they have sometimes merged together with different ideas and become more conceptually coherent. Then comes the colour and Photoshop and more recently, handmade prints, all utilising a layering approach which is incredibly important to me. I just have a sense when a piece of work is complete as I am eager to move on to the next one in the series as I know if I overcomplicate it, it will ruin what I have achieved, but ideas breed ideas so there is always more to do.
Can you tell us about the series American Dream, Transmission Brutalism and Unnatural World?
American Dream began with a fascination with the American TV series Madmen created by Matthew Weiner. I think it’s an amazing series. It was something about this idea of the ‘high life’ but was actually a portrait of a consumerist nightmare, engulfing young minds in the dark world of advertising. I couldn’t stop thinking about the set design and the way the film framed the high Modernist artworks on the walls of the office. I kept thinking about them as windows to war-torn countries, but this language was too overt and I’m not trying to be overtly political. I’m not trying to make a statement about Capitalism just examine the lifestyles and ideals in this series that many Westerners still live their lives by. I’m no exception but do try to be critical and self-reflective. The first in the series was ‘Looks Like Art’ and I think it captured a good snapshot of a kind of Pop Art sensibility merged with a kind of distanced critical stance. Maybe this American Dream was too good to be true and once you’re in, is there any way out?
Transmission Brutalism emerged from the controversy Brutalism seemed to provoke in Landscape Architects and also many of the general public. People get very emotional about the environments they live in, and it has a reputation for being both beautiful and ugly, futuristic and dated. It didn’t fit neatly in any boxes. It interested me because everybody I met had a strong opinion on it. It seemed to be a form of Architecture that divided you into one camp or another. It was built to last and that seemed to offend some people. Whether you appreciate it or not it made you feel something. I latched on to the ideas of something both future and past and tried to imagine what our experience of cities might be like in the future. It’s like a digital, fragmented overload and plays with fears about our future. What needs to stay the same, what needs to change and who is deciding how that change will happen and what it will look like?
The Unnatural World series was my step back into making art in a serious way. It emerged out of my engagement with a TV series named ‘Natural World’. The long shots of landscapes in the series of far-away and exciting places caught my attention immediately. I took photos of these shots and digitally painted them in Autodesk Sketchbook. I wasn’t happy with the work at this stage so kept pushing the illusion further away from myself; into another space and then into another space until the images were distorted and far away and became representations within representations. Landscape architecture has a close relationship with ecology and ‘the natural world’. I thought this was interesting as I also learned on the course that spaces we assume are ‘natural’ are in fact highly managed landscapes. It became a way of searching for ‘the real’ in an ‘unreal world’. Maybe if I visited these landscapes in person, I would have a different perspective, but I can only capture that experience through some kind of representation, in this case, art. If something can be a representation but not what art ‘is’, that elevates it to the status of art. I’m trying to ask that question with this series.
We saw Tao Seed on your website can you tell us about the project?
It’s a snapshot of a scene that appears in a high-fantasy, epic book series titled, ‘The Ancestral Odyssey’, written by Duncan Gill. The first is called ‘The Utopian Dream’ published in 2016. The author is currently releasing the sequel ‘Rise of The Black Doves’ and is writing the third instalment ‘Seeds of War’. The art in question was going towards Duncan’s short film that will depict an intense pivotal moment before an ancient Celestial shrine, focusing on two key characters opposed in their objectives and beliefs. The dramatic encounter transpires in ‘Seeds of War’. The film is on hold until funding can be found for the project. Investors who are interested can contact Duncan directly. I worked closely with Duncan on the project and it was a very different experience helping an author visualise their work for film, rather than realising my own vision. I had limited information to work with as this book, ‘Seeds of War’ has not yet been published so it was a very exciting process to discuss Duncan’s themes, and ideas, and translate them into a visual language.
Which artists inspire you and why?
Vik Muniz- He has a unique way of approaching representation through materiality and his work engages people socially. I first discovered him about 6 years ago when I saw the documentary ‘Wasteland’ directed by Lucy Walker. His portraits of the garbage pickers are so moving and clever.
Ellen Gallagher- She is an incredibly clever and talented artist in my opinion. I discovered her work at art school about 13 years ago. The way she engages different languages to create something that doesn’t fit neatly in any boxes but becomes something in and of itself while engaging you visually is amazing.
David Hockney and Patrick Caulfield- I think both artists have a sense of creating art that has a sense of place and place-lessness at the same time and their use of colour has inspired me greatly. They are legends in the art world, and it makes you wonder ‘Where is this place that their work is coming from, and can I ever go there?’
What are you working on currently, and do you have any exhibitions coming up you can tell us about?
Work from my new series has been accepted to an exhibition with Cista Arts. It’s work I’ve never shown before so that’s exciting. This is a series I’m working on a series that is based on sets in films of New York mainly from the 80s’ and 90’s. It kind of playing with this ‘place and place-lessness’ idea. I’ve always wanted to visit New York but never had the funds or opportunity to do so. I get all my knowledge about the city from films set there. I’m kind of examining my dreams now that I am an adult and forming a kind of socio-psychological poetry on my visions of New York constructed over years from iconic scenes while engaging with a kind of self-reflective cynicism. I guess I’m asking myself how our dreams get constructed and how our journeys getting there change them.
What is your ultimate ambition as an artist?
I’d like to work as an artist full-time with some room to work on independent film concept art projects on the side for fun. I want to find representation with a gallery and sell enough work to progress my ideas while having time to learn new creative skills. I’d like enough money to go travelling. One day I would like a big studio in a barn full of printmaking equipment and printers and a ridiculous amount of different coloured printing inks.
