September 2016 Artist in Residency: KATE HAMPEL

Floodwall by Kate Hampel

This month, Kate Hampel will be in the lab as our Artist in Residence! Kate will be producing prints on fabric for new sculptural works to be presented at upcoming shows this fall.  

Kate Hampel holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal. Her work is interdisciplinary and is concerned with gender, power, violence, and taboo.

Based in Chicago, she has participated in residencies across the United States, including the Vermont Studio Center, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, and was the recipient of the Fountainhead Fellowship in Craft/Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been shown at galleries, museums, and art fairs in Canada, the United States, and Asia.

Read our Q + A with Kate below!

You work often with self-portraiture, and it seems that you expand the idea of a self portrait beyond standard image-making. Would you speak a little about the use of your body in your work?

The theme of the body is one that comes up a lot—ultimately I’m working with ideas and aesthetics of power, and there’s a real physicality to those aesthetics that always comes down to the body at some level. I think of it as a very primal material which is why it ends up emerging beyond the image. With regards to self-portraiture particularly, it’s really been a natural process—it’s always made sense to me to use my own body, since it’s the lens through which I experience the world.

What is your relationship to the printed image, and how do you use it in your practice?

At this point in my practice I’ve merged what were once two distinct areas for me: photography and sculpture. I have a background in fiber so working with cloth as a mutable, permeable surface has always been part of my work, and in the last several years I’ve used that surface as a substrate for images as well. Going from the two-dimensional image back to three dimensions on fabric allows for distortion and a lack of preciousness, which is really important to me. I want the work to be tactile and physical.

What are your plans for your residency at LATITUDE?

I’ll be making work for two upcoming shows this fall: a group show in Toronto at the Queen Elizabeth Park Cultural Centre and a solo show in Los Angeles at A-B Projects. I’m planning to print fabric yardage for sculptures and test out some new surfaces as well. I’m hoping to set up a sewing station in the lab, and also to print some large-format backdrops on paper for installation work.