The Swan Coach House Gallery is illuminated in natural sunlight, shining upon Kate Burke’s exhibition of mosaic collections titled, The Song I Sang As You Swam Away. The titular piece, Digital Storage 101: Scrollin’ past dreams, schemes, and memes trying to find myself in everything, is a large assemblage composed of mosaics, perler beads, polymer clay, and ceramics with imprinted social media screenshots. Here we encounter Kate's medley of various mediums, with Liquid Nails adhesive binding these items, harmonically remediating the way we collect material and visuals that shape identity, time and understanding. With the title of this piece in particular, and echoed throughout the body of work, Kate has named that human urge I, and I assume the collective we, so often try to mask: placing the self in the external. Kate explores how the digital realm can function as a chaotic playground for spirituality, and grounds us in the very real place we go looking for ourselves: through poetic prose, the digital realm, and reminiscent items.
We acknowledge how harmful social media’s impact is toward our perception of self, yet we don’t often sit with how enmeshed in our collective psyche it has become. Though we can’t unglue ourselves from it, we can take a better look at the adhesive. Kate swims within this sticky understanding, taking the basic building block of the internet, the pixel, as a simple visual cue for reinterpreting how the digital influences our material world and sprinkles it throughout her work. Childlike wonder abounds through her use of materials and various colorful ‘bits and bobs.’ These works, to me, reflect how it felt to first come upon the digital age through KidPix and low-res animated websites. The Internet was a fantastical place, its essence perhaps more alive in its rudimentary capabilities and charming limits. The twenty-one works in this show all carry this touch of digitization, yet restore the joy of creating within pixelated parameters. The work visually cannot be understood quickly, but delightfully holds your attention through composition, tactility, and high-spirited colors.
Kate's structured, labor-intensive process contrasts our engagement with the rectangle so often glued to our hands, the one that methodically blurs our already porous understandings of self, perception, other, illusion, message, and especially time. Her process directly interferes with the attention economy, bringing care and attention back into the material world and disrupting the forces vying for those currencies. The digital world can be viewed as one square containing endless smaller squares, and Kate's painstaking, piece-by-piece assemblage reclaims the way social media steals, zaps, and wipes our experience of time. With this metaphor, Kate joyfully loses sense of time in the process of creating. Time goes by in a blip, yet much time has passed.
Time and attention also appear through a “karmic evolution of material” Kate shares. Some materials are gifts from friends, some are recycled ceramics that find community housed with other bits of work. The pieces feel as though they’re taken from longer essays, poems, and passing thoughts, all written with a melodic approach. This tactile lexicon asks for your attention. Your time is rewarded through the gentle labor it takes to reap some of the messages burrowed within; as the work demands to be viewed both up close and at a distance. Kate reflects, “This is how my mind functions in life; being so in it allows me to hone in on the specificity, then zooming out to hold it as a whole.” This dynamic is evident in every piece here: I want to step back to take in the composition but then dance right up into it as I marvel at a specific rock, bead, or moment. There’s details both in the details and in the big picture.
Kate’s titles range from poetry to meta observations she came across while trying to decide on titles for her work: “I wanted to call this piece ‘Great Expectations,’ but then realized I’ve never read the book or seen the film. I googled it just to see if I could get the gist, got disinterested and ended up here.” There is an un-self consciousness on display in her messages, both playful and poignant. Upon her singular stained glass piece, Kate bestows the title Light of my Life, a nod to the phone, backlit and seemingly containing our whole lives. Weird Baptism Piece, a standout work, was inspired by the sheer overwhelm of that-feeling-of-dread when you accidentally like someone’s post too far back in their profile. The flood of hot sweat and red cheeks is an experience we all know with regard to social media lurking. Kate poeticizes this feeling with a spiritual reminder:
Capsized by the weight /
of the fear /
I AM ALIVE /
life happens right here
The words swim within gradients of rich blues and is perhaps her most beaded piece. Above white tiled waves, the first stanza is held. The bottom half holds life happens right here, the final verse almost crashing into the organic, curvy ceramic shapes forming a jumbled, oceanic mash at the bottom. My nervous system calms taking in this blue and I remember we are all connected to this fear of what it can mean to be alive and perceived. Kate’s reconstruction of the square format humanizes our seemingly isolated experiences with social media, instead offering points of interconnection.
Eyes are a repeated symbol in this body of work, reminiscent of surveillance. Are they keeping an eye on Kate’s world or are we keeping our gaze on them? It’s not that the outside world hasn’t left its influence, but there seems to be a protective barrier that allows for self exploration. Such as in Fate of the Mustard Seed, scrawled into a ceramic with the drawing of a bloom, is Alive and Surprised, Am I doing this correctly? Being perceived can be awkward. Believing in something can be uncertain, having faith is often more rooted in feeling than logic. It is hard for a plant to break through the earth. And while a mustard seed won’t question its correctness, humans learn to.
Through her own deconstruction to her relationship with western capitalized christianity, Kate noticed the Internet was similar to the church’s imposing structure; it could be used as a substitute in dictating how we interpret the world. “The internet, akin to religion or the spiritual, exists only here (mind) and here (hands). It exists because we have the belief that it does. Followers, Platform, presenting the ideal, all share western capitalized religious ideals as well.” This holds power. At the intersection of Kate locating her own agency within these structures is the playful inner child who digests the world by keeping the hands busy, seeking correctness based on their own rules of play.
Kate uses mediums that nod to diminishing lines of separateness. Everything recycles in us: friend’s ideas, second hand gifts that spark a connection with material, what we cherished as children reappearing as a way to communicate life, loss, embarrassment, and humanness. Kate shows us that we can absorb it all without borders and reject hierarchical purity for organizing what goes where. Play is the genre for which it can all exist and be sorted and stored together, and Play is the feeling and invocation of freedom Kate encourages in these pieces. Her joy in revisiting these nostalgic tactile materials and using them anew bridges and blurs present reality with past. Inherent to the work is a de/re constructive relationship. Bead by bead, a work emerges to deconstruct and rebuild (craft, religion, the internet, self perception) into a structure that feels good, marrying her multiple mediums together to reiterate, skew, and construct the multi-layered worlds of tactile language.
The Song I Sang As You Swam Away invites a deep dive into the pixelated, infinite, colorful scraps of our shared world. Kate’s visual lexicon holds a yellow-brick-road element, coaxing us to follow her to a place playful enough to more possibly hold our fleeting world, sped up by the access to an unearthly weight of information.While the square is a somewhat rigid form, it also feels curvy, sharp, soft, breathy and alive in these mosaics. The digital realm, so often experienced as black mirror, is challenged by Kate’s colorful interpretation, confidently allowing viewers into her wandering mind through melodic poetry and stream-of-conscious use of material. Kate’s digitized worlds shape the uncontainable paradoxes of human wonderings, about self, time, illusion, perception, and through playful attention teaches us too to swim.
Thank you Kate for being so generous with your mind and sharing such insight into your beautiful work. You can find Katie Burke ‘s work at:
https://www.kateburkestudio.com and on instagram @kateburkestudio
Deep, deep appreciation to the editors who helped shape my tumbling language:
Indy Hyatt (they/she) is an artist and writer living in Atlanta (@indyquinnhyatt)
Rebecca Rodriguez (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist and musician living in Atlanta (@armarierodriguez) & beccarodriguez.github.io/bug-world