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RDI Spotlight: Kate Blee
In the latest edition of our series on Royal Designers for Industry, Blee reflects on her career as an artist, designer and maker
Summary
Kate Blee, RDI reflects on a cross-disciplinary practice shaped by colour, material, collaboration and the physical intelligence of making. Moving between textiles, painting, sculpture, ceramics and architectural commissions, Blee is drawn to that which connects. Against a culture of speed, disposal and digital abstraction, her work suggests that material experience can restore care, meaning and emotional connection in an increasingly overloaded world.
My time at art college was formally in textiles, but I seeped out into print and papermaking and moved in and out of ceramics and architectural projects. My family background is in architecture, so I grew up listening to conversations about space creation, materials, composition and scale.
I usually work alone in a studio-based practice, primarily through painting and sculpture, developing ideas by trying things out, rarely saying no, and expanding into different environments – a singular engagement of ideas and making. The design side of my work, in contrast, always involves collaboration, and I enjoy the stimulation of all the players and parts of a commission.
Through it all, I am looking for what connects us, what we might collectively respond to – what feels familiar, calming and approachable. Colour, with its vast emotional connecting possibility, is a real focus of my work, operating in every material it sits within. But I am also looking for something universal – something to do with the relationship between our bodies, our emotions and our environment. Something natural of which we are all a part.
Messy imperfections
It feels to me that this relationship is what we need now more than ever. The physics of life is where we balance, physically and emotionally, and yet the physical, sensual experience is the very thing that we now seem to be losing: the messy imperfections, the cracks and scars, all the uneven beauty of variety. It feels important that we consciously remember to value what we used to take for granted as the actions of living – the daily engagement in everyday physical tasks that develops into bodily skill, satisfaction and self-reliance.
My studio work often involves the careful setting up of a situation in which things can simply happen. I am trying to exert a kind of soft control, one where I am able to learn through direct experience, observation and reaction. I play with that control, with substance that is on the move and sometimes unstable.
I love the things that happen when I am not around – to go away and come back to change is brilliantly exciting. This might involve pouring dye onto a horizontal surface and then lifting the surface to vertical and letting gravity move the colour, exploring the subtlety in the particular – the amount of dye, the viscosity of the dye, the moisture in the cloth… every condition affects the outcome.
I love the things that happen when I am not around – to go away and come back to change is brilliantly exciting
View more of Kate’s work
Circular thinking
The physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that the world is not made of things, but of events and relationships. Nothing is solid, everything is a reaction, and we should think of life as “kisses, not stones”.
I am very inspired by this way of seeing and it poetically underlines our responsibility to put things out into the world that embrace circular thinking.
There is great potential in emotional connectivity through material – connections that create meaning can promote care and longevity. However, our culture increasingly involves the fast acquiring and disposing of things and this has become a kind of addiction.
There is a section in novelist Linn Ullmann’s book Unquiet that has stuck with me: “We acquired things and used them and disposed of them. What we liked best was disposing of them. It felt like disposing of the bad and burdensome parts of ourselves.”
It is hard to understand how we might slow that train when economists, politicians and conglomerates are so fixated on growth and AI. But the mental health crisis must be in part related to an increasingly manic existence that involves unsettling levels of speed and overload. Time is precious, and we need to encourage each other to protect that breathing space where unexpected and beautiful things happen.
Kate Blee, RDI, FRSA is a cross-disciplinary artist working across design, installation, sculpture and painting. Her work is in numerous public collections, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Portcullis House at the Westminster Parliament, The Wellcome Trust, Cambridge University and several NHS trusts. Kate has been a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art and was awarded Royal Designer for Industry status by the Royal Society of Arts in 2015. She lives and works in London.
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