Kate Squires
Kate Squires is an artist, researcher, curator and lecturer. She is a Lecturer BA Fine Art at University of Westminster and is working towards a practice-based PhD in Fine Art: The Ambiguous Object: Between Literalness and Illusion in Contemporary Sculpture.
She has an expanded practice in the domain of sculpture, in which performance, film and education settings help to unravel and create new connections. Ambiguous objects communicate the idea of use and consumerism, whilst material approaches draw on processes of mass production via the often laborious, hand-made or DIY. Spatial encounters allow the identity of these ‘part-objects’ to be in the world, where the surface and the object become unhinged and the meanings become unstable, allowing new thoughts to fuse together or splinter off. When materials fuse with other materials they make something new, the same is true of language, this is used as material. Systems of language and visual systems of things are where we operate within and become expert at in the arts school. The close proximity to materials and process in the studio oscillate with conversations in the art school. This oscillation is reflected through research, arts education is often about the relationship between making and language. Between literalness and illusion.
In 2019 she was Resident Artist in the Materials Cupboard, Tate Modern, in collaboration with Tate Learning. In 2015 she was Artist in Residence in Learning and was commissioned to develop an Open Studio at Tate Modern. Between 2009 and 2014 she founded and organised Centrum, Berlin, an artist project space in Berlin, Germany. She has worked in gallery education for over fifteen years both as an artist and curator. Roles have included Communities Curator and (Acting) Head of Education and Public Programmes at Whitechapel Gallery and she was Head of Education at Camden Arts Centre (2003-2008 and 2014-2017). She has exhibited in the UK and internationally including 6second Gallery, London, Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury, Tintype, London and CICA, South Korea. She is a trustee for Action Space which supports artists with learning disabilities.