Kate Knight is based in Folkestone, Kent.

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For two decades, Knight’s work has been a retort to erotic 18th-century miniature portraits, which has been a fundamental inspiration underpinning her practice. Upon a visit to The Wallace Collection, London, in 2003, she uncovered behind a leather-clad case a collection of painted females bound in miniature gilded frames, voiceless and often nameless. In rebuke to these portraits, she obsessively sought to expose and weaponise these privately intended titillations, twisting them into challenging acts of womanhood. The scaling up of the ovals is an act of defiance, problematic with frontal imagery holds no escape. Her themes speak with irreverence of the in-between and unseen. Both physical and psychological battles seek to relay, and turn on its head, the felt female experience. Painterly acts of bodily calamity revel in a fluxing vulnerability that teeters between tradgedy and slapstick, pushing fourth emboldened females, sometimes successfully.

 

The work is loaded with a playfully cartoonish aeasthetic, like a joke with comic brutality. This speaking out loud is upheld by the foundations of craft and a material tradition, a long-held role in the feminine psyche, the thing we can run to if all else fails. By drawing upon methods that are sacredly ritualistic in nature, this layered and genuine build of gesso making treats the surface akin to skin. It massages and nourishes whilst willing into being a material anima, bearing this practice as it moves to enchant what is to become disenchanted. Somewhat of an apology to soften the blow for what is to come…

 

Dr Maria Walsh said of my work at Flowers ‘Artist of the Day’, 2010

“Knight’s work is like a feminine deconstruction of Francis Bacon, it isn’t just painting, it’s installation”.

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Knight graduated with an MA (distinction) fine art from City and Guilds of London Art School in 2021, as well as, being awarded the Eversheds Painting Prize upon the BA (Hons) from Chelsea School of Art and Design in 2005.

Most notably her work was selected for Artist of the Day, at Flowers Central, Cork Street, London, as well as, selected the runner up for the Marmite Prize for Painting 2010. She was selected by Rebecca Wilson for the ‘Burning Bright’ Emerging Artists from Saatchi Online, 2012, Hyatt, London. Recently Knight was selected for The ING Discerning Eye 2020 and Delta Gamma @ Saatchi curated by Zavier Ellis for The Contemporary Art Academy 2022.