Katie Paine, THE SECOND CHARADE, 2021
Katie Paine is an artist and writer working with the concept of time and the limits of language, stylised through the lens of sci-fi, medical graphics and medieval imagery. Her maximal practice is gaining her broader recognition, as she incorporates dense collages ,intricate drawings, and evocative poems in cryptic installations that resemble a gigantic board game. Paine stands out from her peers by offering a unique exploration of images, where she breaks meaning apart, until it ceases to be meaningful, to reveal the deviance of communication. Paine explains that her practice ‘“builds fictional worlds that question the communication systems we rely onto make sense of the world. Images and language may seem like the foundation of our knowledge but they can also be slippery, fallible, even monstrous.”
Like an octahedron dice in a game of chance, rolling many sides, she draws from a wide arrange of references—ranging from history to gothic literature—to create fictitious realms that comment on theuses, and misuses, of speech. She often probes at medicalised bodies and the institutions that bureaucratise them, considering how the pictures and words we use to create knowledge travel in, and out of, time.
Curators regularly include Paine in group shows, such as Perspectivesof Distance for Nagano Sky Arts Festival in Japan, curated byJesse Hogan, and The Grammar of The Glitch at Latrobe ArtInstitute, curated by Kent Wilson. She has also held solo shows inseveral artist run spaces, such as SEVENTH Gallery, Kings Ari, IreneRose, and c3. She is now completing her Masters of Fine Arts at VCA.