Kate Street

Milk Maid, 2019

Collage
22.5cm x 30cm

Kate Street is drawn to the physicality and tactile immediacy of analogue publications. Street’s practice engages with pre-digital print culture: its textures, imperfections, and the quiet evidence of time and handling. There is a deep interest in the afterlives of printed matter when discarded or when obsolete imagery is reanimated to suggest new, often ambiguous narratives. Found images and objects become collaborators that shape the development of each piece. The material is sourced from vintage hobby guides, agricultural manuals, erotica, domestic and industrial detritus. By dissecting and reassembling them, slippages emerge between figuration and abstraction, desire and discipline, nature and artifice. The work is rarely framed in traditional ways, instead pinned, clamped, or restrained directly to the wall, creating a sense of containment or resistance. In an age of weightless digital imagery, Street foregrounds the handled, the damaged, the repurposed. The work carries the traces of their histories while proposing new and unresolved meanings.

“One of my earliest memories was of a school trip to a dairy farm. I remember being rooted to the spot with horror and curiosity as the cows were led in and connected to the milking machines. This came back to me one lunchtime as I expressed in the locked first aid room at work, whilst eating my sandwiches. When I made the collage Milk Maid, I had stopped breast feeding my daughter, and was trying to renegotiate my altered body and role as wife and mother – ruminating on the conflicting roles women play in society and behind closed doors.”

katestreet.net