Artists Statement
Kit Kingsbury is based at the Waygood Studios in Newcastle upon Tyne and studied Fine Art at the University of Northumbria. Kit employs photographic negatives of images exploring her journeys through foreign urban environments, as source material for the construction of her paintings. The use of photography in Kit’s work is intended to question the ability of the photograph to capture a moment in time and provide a facsimile of reality.
Kit’s paintings examine some of the arguments inherent to Structuralist philosophy. The artist plays on the fact that there is a limit to the amount of visual information one can assimilate in any given glance. Based on the Structuralist premise that humanity’s concept of reality is a product of one’s endeavour to decipher an incomprehensible sum of stimuli; Kit deliberately attempts to over-stimulate the viewer into forming a hypothesis concerning an image before realising that any alternative reading exists. Consequently, her paintings, through providing the viewer with a number of possible interpretations, attempt to question our notions of reality.
The artist attempts to manipulate the viewer into forming subjective associations with her work through using an ambiguous narrative, a fusion of abstract and representational elements, negative images and differing perspectives. Therefore, paintings such as Metropolis feature a broad array of colourful, indistinct and obscure motifs selected to promote, contrasting interpretations, dislocate them from a literal reading and overall, disorientate the viewer.
Recently, Kit completed a six-month residency in Japan. During the residency, the artist created Edo, a series of small-scale paintings exploring her experiences an outsider travelling around Japan. Through hanging the paintings in a variety of configurations, the artist attempted to depict a fragment of the overwhelming amount of data bombarding one’s visual senses at any one moment.
Kit Kingsbury is based at the Waygood Studios in Newcastle upon Tyne and studied Fine Art at the University of Northumbria. Kit employs photographic negatives of images exploring her journeys through foreign urban environments, as source material for the construction of her paintings. The use of photography in Kit’s work is intended to question the ability of the photograph to capture a moment in time and provide a facsimile of reality.
Kit’s paintings examine some of the arguments inherent to Structuralist philosophy. The artist plays on the fact that there is a limit to the amount of visual information one can assimilate in any given glance. Based on the Structuralist premise that humanity’s concept of reality is a product of one’s endeavour to decipher an incomprehensible sum of stimuli; Kit deliberately attempts to over-stimulate the viewer into forming a hypothesis concerning an image before realising that any alternative reading exists. Consequently, her paintings, through providing the viewer with a number of possible interpretations, attempt to question our notions of reality.
The artist attempts to manipulate the viewer into forming subjective associations with her work through using an ambiguous narrative, a fusion of abstract and representational elements, negative images and differing perspectives. Therefore, paintings such as Metropolis feature a broad array of colourful, indistinct and obscure motifs selected to promote, contrasting interpretations, dislocate them from a literal reading and overall, disorientate the viewer.
Recently, Kit completed a six-month residency in Japan. During the residency, the artist created Edo, a series of small-scale paintings exploring her experiences an outsider travelling around Japan. Through hanging the paintings in a variety of configurations, the artist attempted to depict a fragment of the overwhelming amount of data bombarding one’s visual senses at any one moment.