Kate Liston works with sculpture, moving-image, sound and writing in response to sites and situations, using their limitations to explore world-making. She employs echo and repetition in writing and moving-image to reveal how materials are handled and meanings processed. Her sculptures use a schematic visual language and spatial illusion to present as speculative forms. Installations often act as host spaces, which are activated by live events.
Her PhD Link Zone: an exploration of the sensation of knowledge through a practice of art and writing challenges presuppositions about the immateriality of knowledge. Through materially grounded writing it makes readers alert to their own idiosyncratic perceptions of its meanings. She is interested in the way such embodied experience challenges academic conventions of knowledge production. In 2018 Oh (Mat Jenner and John Lawrence) curated an expansive series of artist responses to the thesis for Black Tower Projects, London.
She is currently collaborating with Tess Denman-Cleaver on Town Hall Meeting of the Air for Baltic 39, an exhibition and public programme exploring the poetics and architectures of civic gathering to open January 2021.
Edited Projects
2021
VARC Associate Artist for ENTWINED: Rural. Land. Lives. Art. (2020-2021)
Town Hall Meeting of the Air (exhibition and public programme: collaboration with Tess Denman-Cleaver 2021)
2020
Volcanoes and Utopias (podcast for BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead: collaboration with Tess Denman-Cleaver)
2019
Polymorph Other (group exhibition: Queens Hall, Hexham, 2019)
2018
Town Hall Meeting of the Air (set design, performance and public workshops at Middlesborough Art Weekender: collaboration with Tess Denman-Cleaver, 2018)
Women Artists of the North East Library (group exhibition: Workplace Foundation, Gateshead, 2018)
A Living Organism (group film screening: Tyneside Cinema, 2018)
Oh-Link Zone (event and group exhibition: Black Tower Projects, London, 2018)
Feel After the New See (solo exhibition: The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018)
2017
Ushering In (solo exhibition: GOLDTAPPED Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2017)
Plaguey (group exhibition: Newcastle Cathedral, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2017)
Softside Promises (performance: Slide Night at NewBridge Projects, UK, 2017)
2016
The Scientific Method (group exhibition: The Tetley, Leeds, 2016)
Dasein and Casein (performance at Society of Artistic Research Conference, The Royal Conservatory, The Hague, 2016)
Writing in Practice-led Research (workshop for Invisible Knowledge Group at CCA, Glasgow, 2016)
2015
Beyond the Goldmine Standard (group exhibition: RPM Record Store, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2015)
Dasein and Casein (performance at Feminism and The Body in Performance, MART, Dublin, 2015)
The Decorator and the Thief…(group exhibition: NGCA, Sunderland, 2015)
They Used to Call it the Moon (group exhibition: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2015)