Hello and welcome to the Infinite Intimate.
My name is Kate Howe. Welcome to the home for the intimate writings and recordings produced from within the body of my visual work. I'm a multi-disciplinary artist living in London.
I write on napkins, in voice memos, texts to myself, on trains, and in my mind while I’m painting, sewing, and sleeping. My writing is spread across my life and is more constant than anything else about me - just the fact that I write.
Over the next few months, we will be loading this Substack with historical writing and uploading new pieces as they come out. You can look forward to poems, short stories, true-ish writing, some of what Audre Lorde called Biomythography, sound samples, experimental readings, and recordings of reading live on stage and at gallery events.
I found Substack because of Katy Hessel, the writer and feminist art historian whom I discovered with glee in 2018, who has since further exploded patriarchal notions of not only art history but human history (because art history is the curated history of the world) whose amazing work you can find here.
Please enjoy, read, comment, share, and as always, thank you for joining me.
For a little more information about me, read on:
Kate Howe (they/them)(b.1971) is a queer, neurodiverse American artist and writer living and working in London. They are the founding Artist in Residence of RuptureXIBIT (+Studio), an experimental artist-led exhibition space.
Howe holds an AA in Technical Theater (highest hons) from Foothill, CA, a BA in Art History (summa cum laude) from Arizona State University, AZ, and a Master’s in Painting (distinction) from the Royal College of Art, London. They are currently undergoing an MFA in Writing at Kingston University, London.
Howe was fortunate to have a one-piece solo at the Aspen Art Museum due to being selected as one of four artists to participate in CORE, highlighting environmental concerns. Their most recent shows include Omitted References, curated by Daisy Wang at the Mile End Art Pavilion in 2022, and Subterranean Organ at The Crypt Gallery, London in 2023. Howe is a Wild Parlour Artist’s Philosophy Collective member and participated in their inaugural show Alternative Airport at RuptureXIBIT, London, in 2023, producing and writing the catalogue. Most recently, Howe was selected for the show Light Being, curated by Jonathan Miles at Lychee One, London, in 2023. Howe was recently chosen for the Orleans House “Artists Make Space” residency program, which will take place at Orleans House Stables Gallery from August through September of 2024, concluding with a two-week solo show at that venue.
Howe’s post-feminist practice, which includes painting, drawing, writing, tattooing, sound, film, installation, theater, performance, poetry, spoken word, textile and sculpture, and social and experiential practices, examines the Polemics of Pulling.
Howe begins at the source: their own body crisscrossed with these forces: tactile, to be read with fingertips and breath. From the intensely intimate, practice catapults into infinite: all bodies are riven and sutured: bodies of thought, political bodies, bodies of identity, knowledge, bodies of earth, bodies of belief and faith all are pulled apart and pulled back together. We are an infinite human yo-yo: our intrinsic aspirational desire - all temples have stairs, god is Up - and the inevitable need once up to consolidate power – all that gold has to go somewhere. Every rending demands a repair, every repair leaves a mark, and every mark informs the future; in every future, inevitably, the rending occurs again.
“Running through all my work are the seams of things being healed from rupture, the scar of having been brought back together, pregnant and uneven, forever imprinted with what came before.”