KATHRYN
DODD

         
         

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…in my work I am talking about traffic, the to-fro movements and twists of cultural issues and migrations but also the to-fro communication with our heritage and our ancestors - for me personally the to-fro dialogue with the dissociated self alienated through ruptures in psychological security. I think a lot about the ‘skins’ and layers that separate this-from-that and the ‘fields’ in which thoughts and acts are contained - the limitations and descriptions we use to delineate. I am interested in the power of names and naming in our psyche – the true magic spell of words. I listen closely to the ghosts that come my way and report their whisperings. If there is a good reason for me to stay here and work in Wales it is language, poetry…my work is a fusion of words and images and this seems like the right place to be doing it.”
    
     
       
                   
Kathryn in front of: ‘Shrine’
213 x 213 cm
plaster, gesso, gold & Oils on panel
Studied at Epsom School of Art and Design, Surrey; Roehampton Institute – Digby Stuart College, London and through The Society of Scribes and Illuminators Associate Scheme.
Worked as a freelance calligrapher, graphic designer and calligraphy and lettering tutor, writing accredited courses for Surrey Open College Federation and Sutton College of Liberal Arts before setting up her studio in West Wales in 1995.
She has exhibited throughout Britain since 1990 and has work in private collections in UK, London, New York and Spain.
Published work:
‘Fine Words, Fine Books – Masterworks of Modern Calligraphy and Bookbinding’
‘The Rhythm of Writing’ – Satwinder Sehmi
‘Step-by-Step Calligraphy Projects’ – Sue Hufton
Co-curated and organised the ‘Traffic/Traffig’ exhibition which travelled the work of 14 Welsh and English artists in autumn 2002. 		   
                            ‘Matrix 1’
   
91 x 91 cm
Oils on panel
   
  “...at one level these paintings have a tremendous seriousness, they are full of layers of meaning, and meanings derived from her explorations about the idea of the ‘self’. They contain experiential subtexts and contexts with nature and the creative interactions of living in West – Wales, the sweep from abstraction to figuration to calligraphy and glyphic making and marking. They are highly wrought and finished and also they have a lot of secrets inside them. However, there’s another secret here too about controlling the surface and containing the field or frame where certain paintings become monuments, tablets or shrines like a poetic museum. There is a relationship here with painting as a textual surface and creating compositions that have a lexical referee i.e. like a sports referee who blows the whistle when the rules have been infringed. The words become components to the complex media of ideas being employed in her paintings that are addressing heightened symbolic reference with an iconographic use of imagery and colour – akin to a Renaissance religious tableaux…”
From ‘The Art of Conversation: Recent Paintings by Kathryn Dodd’ – Chris Ozzard 		   
‘Ice Field’
122 x 122 cm
Plaster, Gesso, Gold & Oils on panel
Traffic/Traffig is an exceptionally important exhibition and collects together recent works that operate on many levels, different concepts and art history approaches, which are essentially of Welsh and English concerns. These predominant concerns are of the body, ideas of the self, voice, language, illiteracy, secrets and lies. They embody a number of explorations into the planar surface; notions of the picture and of painting itself; identity as skin; containment fields of the body as a cultural custodian. Art as exposure fields or tableaux for glyph and marking, identikit substrata, mood emulators, memory recognisance, art which throws into the arena of the viewer the processes toward knowledge against the mere barrage of information overloads; concerns of national identity which derive from the underlying British post-colonial ethos of our supposed multicultural society. These factors make this exhibition a hugely enjoyable experience and sharpen our reception to the absorption of the many aesthetics operating here.
From review of the Traffic/Traffig exhibition 2002 - Chris Ozzard, 2002 		     
‘Spell of Winter 5/Ias y Gaeaf 5’
   
91 x 91 cm
Oils on panel
     
          ‘Skinwalker 1-3’
                 

Triptych @ 60 x 60 cm
Oils on panel

 

Kathryn can be contacted at:

    
                                                                 

   

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