About ARTIST

HELLO!

I’m a multidisciplinary artist with a background working in film visual effects. I was brought up in St Albans and then Basingstoke, UK, by 2 strong women - a single mum of 4 and a brilliantly witty granny. They instilled in me tenacity and a mend and make do mentality. When I was little, I wanted to be an Olympic althlete, but had several operations which meant I couldn’t compete as much as I’d like. I was shy and so was often occupied drawing and painting. I sold my first painting at 9 in a kid’s exhibition in St Alban’s Cathedral and then went on to sell paintings at a local gallery as a teenager. I went on to study Fine Art & Art History at Goldsmiths, and soon after graduating in 2001, I moved to Australia and worked in the film industry. I came back to Britain and art later completing a Masters in Fine Art with Distinction at Wimbledon School of Art in 2011.

I was mostly making video art until fairly recently informed by my film job background. Somehow now, one single image seems enough and more recently I rediscovered my love of painting. I find play and humour and collaboration important in my work as in my life. I am a quiet environmentalist and try to do my bit for our planet. Waste is often used as the subject of my art.

As well as being a cinephile and art lover, as I mellow, I’m often found walking the dog, cycling and reading in my local cafe. I live with my son, partner and dog in London.

SHORT BIO
Katie Goodwin (AUS/UK) is an artist and graduate of Goldsmiths and Wimbledon Colleges of Art. Her work has screened at Swedenborg Film Festival, Flatpack festival & Animated Exeter, UK, WRO 15th Media Art Biennale, Poland and Les Sommets Du Cinema D’Animation, Canada. Experimental animation Bang Bang won the Grand Prix Award at Abstracta Film Festival, Italy in 2013 and film ode to amoebae Small Wonders was nominated for Best Documentary at London Short Film Festival 2015. Prominent touring exhibitions include Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2011 and 971 Horses & 4 Zebras in 2012-13 which screened at Tate Modern and Contemporary Art Space, Tasmania.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The act of seeing is no small thing. To see something is to be possessed by it. Sometimes it carries off a part of you, sometimes it’s your whole soul.

Landscapes of the Heart, Motojiro Kajii

Rescuing a lost moment or object and reanimating is a form of bringing it alive - a kind of memento vivere.

I attempt to dig into the recent past and dissect the detritus of what we leave behind. Like a magpie I glean neglected bric a brac and recycle it as source material. For example, a single celluloid frame that did not make the final cut of the Stargate sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: a space odyssey is reanimated into a slow moving anthropomorphic  landscape in A Space Odyssey Omit.

I often use conversation and collaboration as part of my creative methodology. Small Wonders combines the voice of a retired microbiologist’s anecdotal reports of experiments and discoveries - part of his life that he thought was over - combined with hypnotic Bolex footage of one of his early experiments with found footage of people acting in amoebae like ways - a baby crawling and a man rock climbing.

These lost objects are not always tangible. They are sometimes specific experiences or places lost or on the precipice of existence often due to the human effect on the environment and our increasing distance from nature. In Lightness my first self-shot 16mm film, I seek out a dark place in Britain to see the Milky Way but when I get there it’s too cloudy. There is often an absurdity and embracing of things not going to plan and a tongue in cheek humour.

The Morrow is set in East Riding of Yorkshire, the fastest eroding coastline in Europe, where roads are literally falling into the sea like a scene from an apocalyptic movie. A wartime pillbox part buried on the beach is intercut with underwater footage and the names of settlements lost to the sea. “Nothing is as secure as we like to think it is.” says the Yorkshire lilted voiceover.

My most recent work, the Scuzzy Landscape paintings, like my films before, are usually devoid of the human figure featuring discarded manmade objects left behind in the landscape. For example, the footprint of a decommissioned power station on a Welsh beach or neon pipes in the grass at a park or 3 fridges and a bin bag flytipped on a street corner under a tree. Their what3words title refers to the exact location where the viewer is standing. Not your usual picture holiday postcard view but beguiling I hope nonetheless. 

Katie Goodwin

Go to my ARTIST CV