Katie Healey (she/her they/them )
I make paintings.
My rooms are decorated with paintings of paintings of created places, unreal worlds. Yet, those paintings sit in a real space and interact as part of life. The imagined is manifest through art, it becomes a real thing which interacts with real spaces and real people.
I am currently painting interiors, intimate environments that reflect the complexity of human living. Oddness seeps into the everyday, commonplace objects sit as symbols for a life remembered, and forgotten. Paint fills the gaps between living and dreaming. Through installation I invite people to inhabit this world, not in its image, but in reality.
I am fascinated by the human appreciation of beauty and how it relates to everyday visual hierarchies. What we choose to pay attention to; why a painting might be considered more important than a table or pamphlet, an icon on a screen or a road sign. How the visual hierarchies of the modern world interact with social hierarchies, how different people interact with artwork and the artworld and what makes people feel out of place in art spaces, or how some art feels out of place in people spaces.
The in-between, that liminal space that bridges the real and the imagined, inside and outside, is I believe a key part of all creativity, and I attempt to highlight this relationship in my work. The familiarity of the home, bright colours and beautiful shapes placed in a strange context, loss and decay linger in an infinite house, hung with paintings made as icons, like windows on a computer screen, inviting interaction, investigation, infinite entertainment.
Contact
The Picture Box – Installation
Katie Healey’s The Picture Box is an installation in collaboration with itself. Beginning with DEAD END., the three core paintings, DEAD END., Three Women and Room B00011, tell the story of the viewer as they walk around the space. The spoken words anchor the viewer, holding attention to the image, simulating interaction and guiding focus. The ICONS have escaped from DEAD END. There, they existed as images without material form, translations of their originals, sketches of ideas. Now once again in the real world they float out onto the wall, flattened, button-like, passive. The image is abstracted not as a form but as a concept. The viewer wonders, who lives here? The unsettling nature of the environment slowly becomes more apparent, the repetition, the sneaking threat of infinity, the unidentifiable figure like shapes becoming more and more sinister. A physical, untouchable, point and click adventure game, The Picture box confronts the modern world of the image. An over saturation of information, resettling, defocusing, threatening imprisonment in a world of infinite entertainment. In this transitory life what can we call home but the cumulative records of our past, the material we have in-the-now that evidences the passage of time?
