kate blee

"The placing of colour on cloth; after the moulding of clay it must be the most fundamental, the most ancient form of creativity. There is scarcely a society without it and in our own, at every social and aesthetic level, from a carpet slipper to a vast Renaissance canvas, we see colour on cloth.

Goethe thought that blue was the quintessence of all colour, the true opposite of white. He wrote a whole essay, 'On Blue', in which he tried to wrest his own experiences of the visible world from the grip of Newtonian physics. The intersection of the personal and the physical in our experience of colour, the crafted and the random, is at the heart of Kate Blee's textile pieces. Her dye stuff seeps into the cloth, guided but not quite controlled.

In an age of hyper-realism, digital photography and video, our need for images in art has not diminished, but has changed. Artists have learned what craftsmen - and women - always knew, that we read coloured cloth as a pattern, as abstraction. The line of the horizon, a lowering sky or a rising sun cast shadows on the memory that the textile can awaken. The syncopated beat of woven grid and fluid line tap out a rhythm on the eye. The softer textures of unwoven cloth push the pattern into three dimensions."

Rosemary Hill, 2004