Kate Brown

Born 1985, Griffith NSW
Bachelor of Fine Arts
Graduation show: It was meant to be in 2006 but I had an AVM brain hemorrhage during my final semester of 3rd year and didn’t get to officially present in the grad show. My work The Leaking Sole Project was represented at the 2006 grad show after being left up after my last assessment.

Artwork in Space YZ

Ratitata, 2005
Sound
3:19 mins

Ratitata is a sound piece compiled from several field recordings from around the streets of UWS Kingswood campus and Penrith mall. These recordings are mixed with heavily effected noisy guitar and vocal excerpts recorded in my studio.

This sound piece is hard-hitting and reflexive in parts, it explodes you into a thousand pieces and gently places you back together again. The field recording and production of this piece used a Data recorder and shotgun microphone. This was the first time I played and experimented with these tools.

Ratitata was initially made for David Haines’ sonic landscape class under the project brief ‘Dark Tourism’. It was later presented in a sculptural installation accompanying a suspended handmade metal box and reworked further during an interactive live sound performance in PACT Ensemble’s 2011 Beguiled season.

Tops of Tables, video, 2005

The Journey of the Tip Toe, video and sound, 2006

Drawing experiment, video, 2005

In reflection my time and experiences at UWS were foundational. The things I learnt and experienced there, along with the people I met still influence how I approach my work today.

At 18, I moved to UWS, Kingswood campus from Griffith, NSW. I landed at the student residence accommodation (RES) and quickly found my people, mostly other country kids, Blue Mountains kids and foreign exchange students. Living here, just over the hill from Z block, meant I often pushed the boundaries of how much sleep I needed to successfully function as a human. This was the best and the worst.

On my way to my first class I bumped into Tameka Carter and Louise Dibben who I also knew from Griffith. We didn’t realise we were enrolled in the same course, so celebrations ensued. We made our way into our first lecture with Terry Hayes and Harry Barnett. They presented us with our first project task: create something meaningless and unrecognisable. This was one of many steps to things unravelling into complete and utter beautiful chaos.

Growing up in Griffith and being one of a few ‘freaky individual chicks’ playing music, dressing up and jumping out of cars, it was to my pure delight that I had landed in a space where anything was possible without clean and shiny expectations. It was a space that felt safe and dangerous at the same time. At one of the early grad shows, I remember seeing a noisy band performance with Daniel Green as the lead, smashing a microphone over his head until it bled. We all roared him on. I also had a video class with Jon Wah where he presented a video documenting his day, starting off with brekkie and then taking a shit onto a macro zoom lens. Simple complex systems.

There were beautiful and subtle works too, one by Hiromi Lim, laying in a canoe completely encrusted with sardines, and Ryan Hickey’s drawings and architectural metal pieces. Tameka Carter’s grotesque pimple performances were always so rewarding and sublime to watch. Emily Morandini’s delicate lace circuits and Samuel Bruce’s complex coding animation works were also beasts of their own.

Conversations with lecturers over beers or ciggie breaks were regular afternoons at the Swamp Bar. While at the very beginning of this whole art thing, I didn’t really know what it was that I really wanted to make, I was experiencing and experimenting and finding my way. I was enrolled in Fine Arts but I was quickly attracted to Electronic Arts subjects and spent a lot of time going to sound gigs and became super curious about this space. I often collaborated with performance students and made surreal art video clips, recorded sounds and took advanced drawing classes in which I presented performance works.

I once found a hollowed out blue tongue lizard and included it in an installation piece with stalagmite spaghetti sculptures, surrounded by lamps I had collected and placed blouses on. This was before I’d seen any David Lynch. The dial got turned waaay up after this.

I remember chatting to Harry one day, in the sunshine, about a new work while I was eating a mandarin. He told me not to throw the skin out, and to keep it in my studio and observe the inside of it as it changed. He stated that this would help me navigate what to do next.

And later asking Julie Rrap if heading to Kings Cross to interview sex workers about ideas for my next project was an okay thing to do. She recommended documenting the subtleties and gestures around this. These are the kinds of directions that were given instead of sidelining part of a process or needing an outcome straightaway. The approach to lateral thinking in a class titled Creative Strategies also helped push ideas along in a linked chain.

By far my favourite assessment project was when Joyce Hinterding and David Haines proposed that we each record a 10 second sound piece. They allocated us a timeslot and gave us a phone number to call and play the recording down the phone line. I recorded sounds, alternating across two cassette tapes, layering sounds through a dictaphone and stereo system several times. My Nokia 3310 had no phone credit on it at the time so I raced to a payphone on RES, called the number and pressed play on my dictaphone recording as the answering machine recorded it at the beeeeeeep.

The people I met and friends I made over this time were and are incomparable. The works I saw in the making and still see from these people are ones that I can only link back to this formidable time. The UWS Z block friendship dynamic was spread across so many year groups because of its open layout and cross disciplinary aesthetic. It was never intimidating or egocentric, it was open and inclusive and raw. There are so many more people, technicians and lecturers I could mention and reflect on.

One thing I can definitely say is learning and working at the UWS Z block studio has continually kept me developing and pushing my work to exist in spaces unconventionally and without censorship.