Kate Daudy Trees Moon Press

pop-up exhibition of works on paper by kate daudy

curated by cora sheibani

louisa guinness gallery45 Conduit Street, London 29th April - 9th May 2014

treeS Moon preSS

solo showsMarie Victoire poliakoff, parisparcours Saint Germain, parisSouthbank Centre, LondonBonhams, London

group showsHaunch of Venison, LondonMichael Hoppen, Londonpearl Lam, Hong Kong

CorA SHeiBAni: WHAt WAS your firSt pieCe?KAte DAuDy: i used to carry words written out in my pockets, and sew them in to the hems of my clothes, like talismans. i was writing all the time, and then one day i ended up writing this particular thing i didn’t want to say, as such, but wanted people to know, on my clothes. i cut the letters out in felt and embroidered them all over my outfit, in this sort of fever. i was lucky because it got picked up straight away and suddenly i was supposed to be this ‘visual artist’. it wasn’t any different from what i was doing before, simply people could suddenly see it.

WHAt MAKeS you WAnt to CreAte ViSuAL WorK? What I find most inspiring is music, the people I love, plants growing up through the pavement cracks, the natural world. then languages, the way people express themselves, all these liminal spaces between things, the falling-off-a-cliff into the sublime, of every day life. Making objects is a way of communicating that seems just as worthwhile as the word.

upcoming solo showsrencontres d’Arles, 2014

Galerie Anne Clergue, paris

My main influence is China, and the Chinese way of looking at the world, so calligraphy would be the most important thing. the Chinese literary tradition of writing on objects is a concrete example of a Kantian perspective on things, and that’s what i do in my work. So the Chinese view is not an influence, it’s the core of my work.

inforMeD VieWeverything we see is informed by our memories, our character, the people we see and for me very strongly by my love of art, of music and of the written word.

ALL tHe DetAiL in your WorKI like what Milan Kundera says about our insignificance, and how it is best to get used to that if you want to live happily. i want my work to be like a tool to draw the viewer out of himself, put things back into perspective, and settle back from a slightly altered place. i like texture, the sound of things, the idea that you can give yourself wholeheartedly to something.

AnD noW pHotoGrApHS?We want to hold on to things but we cannot. We live inside snapshots and photographs inside our mind. it is very soothing to turn that frame of mind into something concrete. the elusiveness of time is so heavy. photos are like rafts we can cling to in this churning sea of events.

WHy treeS?they are everywhere; silent witnesses, visual white noise. i enjoy the way they unfold into the air. Mainly because they are so useful.

WHAt Do tHey MeAn? the trees come from stopping keeping a diary. During the thirty or so years that i kept a diary i had not needed to talk to people so much, as i had my intimate paper world. When i stopped i started to look at visual work that expressed feelings without words, and came upon paintings of the late Gothic/early renaissance period during which most art dealt with religious subjects. the scenes are set in often highly expressionistic symbolic landscapes, peopled by trees.

SyMBoLiC LAnDSCApeS. expreSSioniSMi set about doing portraits of these amazing trees, understanding the frame of mind they represented through their shape and movement. niccolo di Buonaccorso’s tree, like a waterfall of fruit, is a tree that sprang miraculously from Joseph’s walking rod when he was presented to the Virgin Mary. i covered the tree with my diary, and with the lyrics of a song which struck me that day on the radio.

HiGH CuLture. LoW CuLturei like to mix ‘educated’ cultural references which might seem more conventional with scenes from contemporary commercial, more manufactured ways of looking at things. in the end we are all part of the same created universe.

WHy A reLAtionSHip WitH tHe preSS?Words permeate the world around us through the media. they are a part of my life experience, my world, and i have a relationship with the media and the people i see inside that virtual world.

We can become so absorbed in our own textuality that we do not see what is around us. We are dominated by our self image, and the self-sufficiency of our routines and patterns. So I like to read the paper not just to know what is going on, but also to snap myself out of just thinking “i need to get some oranges tomorrow”. i am quite a bovine, meditative person, by nature. it’s not always a good thing.

i went through a phase, when my children were small, of barely reading the papers. i didn’t make the time and i didn’t think it would change things. But i learnt that we are never powerless. Just wishing people well, or thinking about them, is better than nothing. that is what the «talking to the press» series is about; this endless internal dialogue with the world, with time, process, the endlessly unveiling potentiality of things, and that we all have something to offer.

Mr HASHeeMi loved this prominent egyptian publisher when i read about him, and the reason he gave for leaving civil-war-torn egypt : “i will not postpone happiness until i die”. i cut out his story, circled his beautiful words in a big red box, so the air would notice them and carry them off to the heavens, and drew a tree over him, made of newspaper leaves of past events, in the shape of a tree by Benozzo Gozzoli, beneath which he could shelter, like the Virgin Mary and her child, on his way out of egypt. My picture is sending Mr Hasheem a hug through the ethers.

AnD tHe Moon?i am in love with the moon, like a little baby wolf on the prairies loves the moon. i especially like the moon in the daytime, when it is all lacy and astonished to find itself there, like a child that had just walked into the wrong room.

CHineSe poetrythe Chinese poets and scholars i like to read follow a tradition of writing letters to the moon. that seems like the best way to say how i feel about it. if i could lie down in a bed and make love to the moon i would, but since i can’t, i make work about it. i have recently started writing to the sun and to the earth as well. Why not? Li po, po Chu yi, even contemporary poets like yang Lian have. i am part of a long string of lovers of the moon. it pleases me to find myself confined within that tradition.

WHiteWhite is the colour of mourning in Chinese. i guess i have enjoyed doing this pale work, which feels clean inside my head. it has a calm rustle to it.