Kathryn Fox is a multi-disciplinary artist, with interests in language, structure and constructs for thought and expression. She takes an exploratory, playful approach in her printmaking, often combining several different processes and materials before arriving at the final printed outcome.
Her printmaking experience is wide ranging, with a current focus on abstraction in screen printing and an interest in achieving the fine balance in her outcomes between spontaneity and measured control.
The work presented for ‘Source’ takes textile and thread as its starting point, or ‘source’, a nod to the history of the space in which it is now shown. Some of the work pre-dates the exhibition callout, some has been made specifically in response to it.
“These screen prints do not use a conventionally designed stencil or positive to make the image, but are made by using textile and thread itself (sometimes combined with torn or cut paper) on the UV exposure unit when ‘burning’ the screen. A ‘drawing’ or design is made in thread, very loosely placed on the glass. The results are not entirely predictable and impossible to repeat. At this stage, the process is very much one of examining the physical properties of the thread or yarn being worked with: its elasticity and strength, tendency to fray or coil, its weight and so on.
The material has to be allowed to tell its own story, with only the slightest manipulation which is sensitive to the physical qualities of each thread. The printing stage of the process requires additional considerations of colour and the surface used for printing.
The visuals that have emerged as prints in the current work are of free-flowing lines which have an almost calligraphic quality. The titles come long after the work is made, requiring a reflective interpretation of the material, process and visual to arrive at a translation back to verbal.
Playful exploration is at the heart of the work – the unravelling, knotting and twisting of spun yarn; the stretch and structure of woven thread – and all that is lost and gained in the transition of one thing at source into another quite different, often unexpected, outcome.”
