Photography (MA)
Katie Bret-Day
Katie Bret-Day is a London based artist that uses viscous materiality of photography to explore the contingent and discursive nature of being. With interests in the posthuman and connected ecology her research explores the amalgamation of digital and physical bodies using alternative methods of image capture, interventions and printing.
In 2018 she was presented as one of five rising talents by the Guardian and her work has been included in the Tate commissioned Photography Ideas Book (2019) and acquired by the British Library.
She has been nominated for both the ReGeneration³ project and the Foam Paul Huf Award and received Creative Reviews Zeitgeist Award in 2018. She also holds a First Class degree from the London College of Communication UAL.
More recently she produced work for the Sickle Cell Society in connection with Imperial College London, this work is representative of her evolving discourse that positions itself between arts and sciences, creating bodies of ephemeral document.
Current Exhibitions
2020 16-20th July, Final, not Over, Unit 1 Gallery Workshop (London)
2020 July-November, Time To Think, Festival Pil’ Ours (France)
2020 January-Present, The Art of the Book, The British Library (London)
Sinking in Air mediates on Posthuman materiality, exploring notions of agential realism; the connectivity, contingency, cause and effect of all being. Visual responses from an expansive and discursive method of research produce an evolving discourse that uses the materiality of the photographic as a slippery extension of the mind, floating in a liminal landscape soaked in dis-figurative reality.
Bringing into focus ideas of singularity, and physiological intelligence I consider how bodies exist in space and time, not in linear forms but as aggregates of perpetual reformation, mitotic assemblages of mortogenesis. From coral bleachings, to slime moulds and black holes there are connections between these material bruisings, oozings and intelligences. By creating images of amorphic being I intend to address how distance brings new perspective and abstraction, empathy.
With no beginning or end it slips between the imagined and the index pulling at the surface of the image and reinvesting it with a human form of address. Bodies made, bodies grown, warm to cold, fully formed but fractured and out of place. Figures of meat and faces of render there are visual battles between micro and macroscopic of those looking out and others staring back leaking into spaces of discomfort and the sublime.
Sinking in Air (click to launch)
