Reclaimed
I met Kate Delany at her exhibition Reclaimed at the Red Door Alchemist Gallery.
It is fascinating to hear an artists story face to face while surrounded by their work.
Kate Delany at the water tower in Buckshole Reservoir in Alexandra Park, in Hastings.
Tell me about your background and your passion for creating art?
Kate. It’s been my life’s passion; from my earliest years, it’s a feeling triggered by things I see. I was always interested in interiors and design at home; I would help my dad with it. He encouraged me; I’d help choose things like wallpaper and kitchen tiles. He even let me design whole rooms at home. I’d love a visit to B&Q and all the furniture shops. I didn’t care so much about toys and that stuff. It was all about seeing rows of hinges, handles or little profiles of wood. I’ve always been obsessed with hardware, stationery, and practical things like that.
My mum was a draughtswoman; she made technical drawings for the local water board. I have heard that she was the most amazing clothes maker; she’d make her own patterns. Unfortunately, she died when I was five, so I never really knew her. There is definitely a creative element in her that I’ve picked up, not necessarily through nurture. It’s a big part of who I am. Who knows, maybe I would have taken a different route. I have a very early memory that mum would draw a figure, and I would copy or finish it off.
Art was my main focus in school which led me to an Art and Design GNVQ. The course had a strong design technology element; I liked the practical parts just as much, being hands-on with woodwork. Then when I was 18, I went to Nottingham Trent University to study textile design. I was a year younger than everyone else and hadn’t done a foundation course; I didn’t know what had hit me, and I wasn’t ready. I made friends with some people on the fine art course; I thought that course looked more open and felt more like it. I could see people doing video, photography, painting, all sorts; it was a very open and contemporary course, even though it was called fine art. So I met with a tutor, who suggested I complete a foundation course for the rest of that year. Then moved on to the fine art degree.
It was very studio-based; you managed your time, and I was not the best at getting up. I soon realised I didn’t want to restrict what I was doing to a canvas; I wanted to break free. We were shown a map of exhibition spaces for our final degree show and asked to pick the area we wanted to use. You could have this white space or that white space or a white corridor. I noticed that the stairwell hadn’t been allocated; it wasn’t an option, but I persisted until I got it. My Dad and I painted it together, and I created a space with colour, shape, reflection, and illusion; I designed something different. So this was installation art, a mixture of my love for shape, pattern and interiors and making an impactful space.
Two piece’s of Kate’s work from the ‘Reclaimed’ exhibition.
After your university education, what happened next?
Kate. I didn’t think making art could be a career; I wanted to go into the interior design industry and started working for a few furniture businesses. I worked in a store that offered a design service; they sold designer furniture from high-end brands. So I started as an interior design assistant creating mood boards and helping customers using an in-store library of papers and fabrics. The manager left because of some dodgy dealings, and I ended up managing the store, which meant that I needed to focus on sales, which I did for a good few years. The great thing was that I got to go to many places to meet manufacturers in Germany, Italy and even Delhi. I’ve worked at the Heals store on Tottenham Court Road, where I was surrounded by amazing products and design every day. Working in the city was fast-paced but fun.
People have commented that I have an eye for balance with my use of 2D, 3D, and colour. It comes naturally, I can look at something and see precisely why it doesn’t balance.
I shy away from straight painting; I can draw and paint realistically; I choose to use other methods. I enjoy working on something more accurate with a planned composition. I often need to include that 3D element and a particular colour palette.
I’ve also been a furniture designer, drawing technical components for the timber and cushion shapes that make up a sofa. I selected fabrics, dealt with marketing, and set up and managed exhibitions. When I was at university, I was obsessed with wood grain and wood effect; I used what I could get hold of at the time: a roll of Fablon, a kind of sticky back plastic wood on a roll. I got a keyboard from a charity shop, and with our old iron, I covered it, so it looked like the keyboard was made of wood. I wanted to make things that didn’t exist, little illusions, and now you can buy this stuff on the high street.
I started to find my style. I used wood grain to create collages, bits of vinyl records and photocopies from 1970s interiors books with their weird, saturated colours, and I cut those images up to build my own. That’s where I started doing what I do; it’s hard to describe the process because it comes naturally, but I remember being shown work by painters Patrick Caulfield and Richard Hamilton and thinking, WOW.
I love working with a ruler, and I’ve worked with measurements all my life. I still do, with my day job in landscape architecture and manufacturing. So I can guess measurements to the nearest centimetre. So when I am looking at plans without a scale, I think, OK, the doors are 700 wide, the table is 700 tall, and a seat is 400 high, everything has geometry, and I see and think about that around me when I’m out and about.
During the first lockdown, I watched Grayson’s Art Club; Grayson Perry’s TV programme. It gave me that push and inspired me to get back to basics. First, I watched an episode about portraits, so I sat and did a self-portrait; I took some photographs, started drawing again and got lost in what felt like a new world. That was the nudge I needed to get me back into creating my work for me. While I was furloughed, I would make something every day; I was determined not to waste time. So, I got back into the flow and started to experiment, and then my head exploded with ideas.
I was waking up in the night and grabbing my sketchbook because I needed to get my thoughts out; they can leave your mind as quickly as they arrive. I started to notice details in nature like I never really had before. Last year, I had a pop-up exhibition space at Hasting Pier Gallery, printing directly from nature, wood, and vegetables. If you cut a cabbage in half, they are all unique inside; you can take segments out and print from those pieces using an ink pad; I like to distort the shapes with my fingers when I press them down to print. You make solid shapes and then grey tones but all totally natural; it’s pleasing to work that way. I enjoy trying different printing techniques.
I’m a perfectionist; things have got to be just right. This can be hard when trying to be looser with my work, which I’m working on.
Tell us about the work in your recent Reclaimed exhibition in Rye?
Kate. I obsess over certain types of architecture, brutalist style, old structures, etc. Often, buildings here for more practical reasons catch my eye, utilitarian. For example, there was a massive water tower, on legs, near where I lived in Stevenage, and I was fascinated with it as a kid. Because my dad worked for the water company, I imagined that he went up and into that tower for work.
A recent collage from my Reclaimed series features the water tower in Buckshole Reservoir in Alexandra Park, in Hastings, near where I live. I took photographs on New Year’s Day while walking as a cormorant landed on the water tower. I segmented the images and combined these with the diamond-shaped concrete sea defence I stumbled across in Broadstairs.
My recent mixed media pieces combine the natural and man-made worlds, but not as we see them. A recent break to Coverack in Cornwall was full of inspiration. I take photos on my phone wherever I go; close-ups of lichen, Cornish quarries, plants growing through bricks, whatever gets me. Using transfer mediums and print techniques, I layer the photography, mixing elements of realism and surrealism, like analogue photoshop. This is a nod to how nature started to fight back during lockdown and climate change. I like to use perspective elements and drop my photography into other forms, often with cutout areas that reveal the surface of the base layer of ply. These elements bring balance to my work and create that feeling of an installation.
Kate Delany at the water tower in Buckshole Reservoir in Alexandra Park, in Hastings.