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07/10/2018 - 01/10/2018

With machine vision, technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to images and the land fluid and problematic. At the core of my practice lies a concern for the surface and skin of the image through which I attempt to channel affect and a more embodied type of visuality, positing the surface as a site of mediation, transfer and transformation. Through the haptic nature of the work, I examine humans’ relationship with the digital and seek to connect with and to slow down our experience of images, calling on lost lore and old forms of knowledge to negotiate technology and scientific advancement.

Kate Fahey, Dark Adaptation, (still) digital video with two channel audio, 8min, tent, 2017 Dark Adaptation was a yearlong project developed from a research trip to Boulby Underground Mine, which houses a Dark Matter Scientific Centre, and is Europe's deepest working mine. A performative text was developed, tested and presented as part of The Laboratory of Dark Matters at Guest Projects in April 2017. The video installation and performance of the text was inspired by a lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in 1917, and performed by artist Tim Zercie and uileann piper John Devine.(Image courtesy of Sara Lynd)
Kate Fahey, Dark Adaptation, (still) digital video with two channel audio, 8min, tent, 2017

Dark Adaptation was a yearlong project developed from a research trip to Boulby Underground Mine, which houses a Dark Matter Scientific Centre, and is Europe's deepest working mine. A performative text was developed, tested and presented as part of The Laboratory of Dark Matters at Guest Projects in April 2017. The video installation and performance of the text was inspired by a lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in 1917, and performed by artist Tim Zercie and uileann piper John Devine.(Image courtesy of Sara Lynd)
Kate Fahey, Divination Sticks, turned hazel, silicon, 2017 Divination Sticks were developed following a research residency working with two crafts people; a diviner and a wood turner, at Callan Workhouse Guild in August 2016. Guided by Richard Sennett’s suggestion in The Craftsman that touch delivers invasive, ‘unbounded data’, the research related more obliquely to embodied forms of sight and knowledge, in particular haptic vision. The project culminated in Secret Stations, a solo exhibition with Callan Workhouse Union and Trasna Productions and a Divining Walk in the town in July 2017. (Image courtesy of Brian Cregan and Callan Workhouse Union)
Kate Fahey, Divination Sticks, turned hazel, silicon, 2017

Divination Sticks were developed following a research residency working with two crafts people; a diviner and a wood turner, at Callan Workhouse Guild in August 2016. Guided by Richard Sennett’s suggestion in The Craftsman that touch delivers invasive, ‘unbounded data’, the research related more obliquely to embodied forms of sight and knowledge, in particular haptic vision. The project culminated in Secret Stations, a solo exhibition with Callan Workhouse Union and Trasna Productions and a Divining Walk in the town in July 2017. (Image courtesy of Brian Cregan and Callan Workhouse Union)
Kate Fahey, Optimistic, resin, copper, 2017 Several Optimistic sculptures were created for a group presentation of work by four artists for the exhibition All the Elsewheres of the World at Zona Mista, London in August 2017. The exhibition was inspired by Foucault’s text Utopian Bodies (1966), particularly the following passage: My body, in fact, is always elsewhere. It is tied to all the elsewheres of the world. And to tell the truth, it is elsewhere than in the world, because it is around it that things are arranged. It is in relation to it–and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign–that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far. The body is the zero point of the world. (Image courtesy of Zona Mista)
Kate Fahey, Optimistic, resin, copper, 2017

Several Optimistic sculptures were created for a group presentation of work by four artists for the exhibition All the Elsewheres of the World at Zona Mista, London in August 2017. The exhibition was inspired by Foucault’s text Utopian Bodies (1966), particularly the following passage: My body, in fact, is always elsewhere. It is tied to all the elsewheres of the world. And to tell the truth, it is elsewhere than in the world, because it is around it that things are arranged. It is in relation to it–and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign–that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far. The body is the zero point of the world. (Image courtesy of Zona Mista)

Kate Fahey

Kate Fahey (b. 1983, Kilkenny) is an artist working with print, sculpture and installation. She received a BA in Fine Art Printmaking from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen and an MA in Fine Art Printmaking at the Royal College of Art, London.

Upcoming projects include I Could Feel that my Eyes were Open, a solo exhibition at Lewisham Art House, London (June 2018). Recent projects include a Mead residency at the British School at Rome, Secret Stations, (solo) at Callan Workhouse Union, Kilkenny, Ireland, Going Dark, Guest Projects, London (2017), The Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA London (2016/17), The Jerwood Drawing Prize, Jerwood Space, London (2016/17), The Artist Traveller, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2017), Reference Mollusk, Gossamer Fog, London (2016), PR!NT, Impressions & Expressions, Editions & Seditions, La Cambre Gallery 425, Brussels (2015), Resonance And Recapitulation: Echo Of a Renaissance, Collaboration with composer Enda Bates, Ormston House Gallery, Limerick (2015) and Spring Exhibition, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2015). She has received numerous awards including the Stanley Picker Tutorship in Fine Art Printmaking (2015/16), the Augustus Martin Print Prize (2015), the Tim Mara Trust Award (2015), the Royal Scottish Academy Residencies for Scotland Award (2015) and the Irish Arts Council Travel and Training Award (2013). She is an AHRC TECHNE funded practice based PhD candidate at University of the Arts, London.

Past Residencies