volume 36 Collage

Katie is a Lake District based designer - painter. She formerly trained as a textile designer and more recently has gravitated towards collage using cloth bound books. Having always been drawn to unusual colour combinations and geometric shapes, Katie’s latest body of work is based around using old book covers as her canvas and palette. This evolution started when one day she saw a mountain of old damaged hard back books in a skip. As a book lover she could not leave them there to be sent to the dump, so she piled them into her studio. Here, she came to appreciate the natural fading of the colours, damage and marks on the covers, a perfect medium for her process, which involves slicing, shredding, skinning and ripping. The pieces came alive in such a delicate way. Katie paints with the blemished faded textile fragments, deconstructing the covers and reconstructing them into individual artworks. Each piece has been taken out of context and abstracted into something else, but the memories and history of former ownership and usage are still evident. The boards that were originally intended to contain and protect creative work have thus become transformed into works in their own right.