Kate Street

I am a Southsea-based artist, curator, and lecturer working across collage, sculpture, and installation. After studying at Winchester School of Art (2001) and the Royal College of Art, London (2004), I have exhibited, taught, and curated internationally. Recent exhibitions include Multiple Universe at Union Gallery, Horror Show! at Somerset House, If These Walls Could Talk at Parlour Gallery, and Pretty Ugly at Thameside Studios.

My practice critically examines representations of the female body across cultural, domestic, and erotic landscapes. Through the playful yet purposeful use of found imagery and objects, I explore how ideologies—often internalised and unseen—are embedded within visual culture. I reframe these narratives through ambiguity, contradiction, and disruption, encouraging new interpretations of femininity as a site of complexity, vulnerability, and resistance.

Materiality is central to my process. I am drawn to analogue publications for their tactile presence and pre-digital aesthetics, allowing the physicality of image and object to guide the making of each work. Acts of cutting, tearing, and layering are both compositional and conceptual—gestural interventions that challenge the authority of the archive. I work with tensions between surfaces: paper and bone, metal and fabric, gloss and decay. These material frictions echo the contested terrain of female embodiment.

Recurring motifs—figuration, landscape, hobby craft, cultivation, and erotica—are used to question what is natural, what is constructed, and what lies in-between. Many of my collages feature female figures in states of limbo. They are part muse and part monster, poised between the sublime and the unsettling. Their fragmentation invites a deeper look at how femininity is mythologised and consumed.


www.katestreet.net