Collecting Rape: Collation, Curation and Response to every item in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Archives that takes Rape as its subject.

I've been accepted at the University of Leeds to begin my doctoral research on the socialization and further gentrification of Rape in November 2024. Here's the proposal and some of the first works.

the Birthday Boar Hunt, Kate Howe, 2024. Oil on sutured Belgian Linen. 280 x 160 cm.

Kate Howe

Ph.D. Research Proposal

4 Jan 2024

Fields: Art, Art History, Gender Studies, Curation, Collecting & Museum Studies, Psychology, Sociology, Criminology, Media Studies.

Collecting Rape: Identification, Collation, Curation, and Response to every item in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Archives that takes Rape as its subject.

The seeds of this research project began with Gentileschi’s 1610 painting Susanna and the Elders at the National Gallery in 2020. I wondered, as I observed myself loving the painting while dissociating from the disturbing feelings it stoked: How many paintings, drawings, medals, tapestries, carvings, drinking cups, necklaces, prayer books and documents are in this – in any – museum about stories like this? Just how much rape are we collecting?

What would it mean if we were able to see it as one collection? Further, a State collection? What is the gaze of the State when viewed through this collection? Ultimately, what are the qualities of this collection? The sensitivities, the points of view, the sociological indicators, what is its power, what does it teach? Who is its audience, who is consuming it, who is exposed to it, what are they learning?

I aim to comb through the V&A in search of rape-related material in order to collate and view the subset as a whole. I wonder: what drives us to make this work, to reproduce this work, to display it, to tell these same stories again and again, to figure them in a way which makes them collectable, how do they inform contemporary viewers?

My practice responds to research questions via the vigorous production of work across many disciplines. Each question produces responses that often start with paintings, and expand to include site-specific installations, performances, socially collaborative performances, sound pieces, readings, tattooing, and texts.

Susanna and the Elders, Artemesia Gentileschi, 1610 oil on canvas.170 cm × 119 cm (67 in × 47 in). Schloss Weißenstein, Pommersfelden

How will the vocabulary of my practice change as it is exposed to the new lexicography of rape? How will my generative impulse respond to the steady diet of rape-related items in the collection? What will happen to my mark-making, composition, subject, and form as these sources perfuse and permeate my practice – an accidental accent, some slang, a stubborn refusal?  – a new generative lexicon.

In 2021 for my dissertation at the Royal College of Art, I responded to Turner’s 1842 painting Snow Storm during the isolation of Covid. I haunted him. Walking his vistas, visiting his shuttered house, and writing to him from his garden, I engaged deeply with this one painting and researched in a fascia-like web of everything about not only its object, but all that the moment of the painting, and how this intersected with the moment of my viewing the painting.

Entitled “Turner was my Covid Hook-Up: Love Letters Across 172 years,” the dissertation included a cycle of paintings, using the compositional elements of Steam Ship-Snow Storm. The meditative drawing practice I used to produce this work is a focused slow-looking activity developed when I became ill in 2017. It is a lexicography of the marks I make while painting, but also a storebox of form and relationship.

Having regained health in April 2023, I am freed completely into my practice and the rhythm of research and response. Maintaining this second chance at health is the key, and so I rest as hard as I work: spy novels and cop dramas. Slow Horses, Killing Eve, Bosch. Most open with a gristly murder, kidnap, or capture. This break-and-enter serial crime as the resting hum of my life feeds my practice on the research side: my research is detective work.

Come on Eileen, Kate Howe 2024. Oil on Belgian linen, 160 x 120 cm

In 2022 I began working in response to Susanna and the Elders. On my studio wall, images were accumulating. Eventually, there were over a hundred images of this woman being attacked: a serial assault, passed down through the ages. I realized I was beginning to look at Susanna as the oldest-ever cold-case crime.

The next year, Titian’s show, Love, Desire, Death came to the National Gallery. I sat in front of The Rape of Europa and engaged in slow-looking meditation drawing practice. The more I looked, the more I wondered why it was beautiful. I was agitated, in love with an image of not seduction but abduction. I felt myself adjust my compass, and overcome my objection, which I was figuring as female discomfit. I was masculine enough to see past the violence into the beauty.

In bringing Titian’s metamorphosis cycle, painted for King Phillip of Spain’s private bedrooms in palaces scattered across Europe together for the first time, the museum had brought private paintings into public. Phillip had commissioned these – he was excited by stories of rape. How can I love the movement of the cloth, the depth of the blue, the dimple of her thigh?

The Rape of Europa, TitianYearca. 1560–1562. Oil on canvas, 178 cm × 205 cm (70 in × 81 in). Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

In 2022, Macuschla Robinson wrote what they refer to as “a procrastination project” which changed my practice. An extraordinary book called Every Rape in the Met Museum, the book serves as a departure point for my continuation of this research project. We hope to eventually expand these projects into joint interrogations in many museums worldwide, collaboratively.

Theatre plays a huge role in my practice, and after seeing the play Ulster American by David Ireland, this new cycle of paintings arose - the first steps in direct response to the subject of Rape in art. These new works take the memory of my own experience with Rape as their starting point. My marks come from a variety of impulses learned from references that tumble across the work, weaving into it. There is Europa, her hand appearing again over the frill of the bonnet of Gericault’s Woman with Monomania of Envy.

I visualize the final project presented in three parts: a dissertation which includes documentation of my own responsive artworks generated, along with writings and research on the collection’s rape-related content. Second, an exhibition in which I show some works produced during the investigation alongside selected paintings in the rape collection, and finally a full catalog of the Rape Collection held by the Victoria and Albert Museum and Archives.

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