Kate Tupper Artist Statement
Formed, fitted, welded hand painted devices . Kinetic and interactive, composed of mild steel, accentuated with mechanics, resins, sound, and light. A collection of 3-D botanics. Hybrid, cocooned mysteries. Crystal, barnacle, matrix technologies. Devices of Sci-fi myth. I use sculpture for modern day storytelling. Mythology, throughout history, helped humans make sense of their world, and I strive to do the same for ours. Several years ago I had a vision, and developed a new personal style that had the potential to hold the information I was assembling.
In many stories, an enchanted object is linked to transformation, healing, opening, and connection, and often the true power of the object was inside the protagonist all along. Sometimes we just need something tangible to remind us. I build objects that reflect the visual patterns I study, and continue to investigate what it takes to unite our community locally and globally, through the creation of a common consciousness; a mechanical solidarity through mutual likeness.
I hoped the work would become devices of connection within our place, each other, and ourselves. Imagery can be utilized creating objects to help keep humanity grounded as it evolves quickly into a world of technology. Using organic visual elements in an attempt to connect us to the earth; keeping the work grounded and relevant. These details are what I usually consider to be the tangible part of the sculpture, the real touchables. There’s an underwritten code in nature. Waves in spirals. A drama to the physical attributes of plants: branches branching, colour to call attention. So often a contradiction of soft petals and thorny protection. My stories are similarly balanced with the dark and the light, tarnished silver, dark romance. Minerals, like geography, are naturally occurring sculpture, and a fascinating catalogue of visuals. Organic bling. Geometric elements are a nod to technology. Balls of weld represent energy. Wire work suggests relationships within the sculpture such as its systems. It can also represent links to the metaphysical, a reality beyond what is perceptible to the senses.
I want to communicate to everyone that steel is not always hard, cold, and brutish. It just becomes what we shape. After spending years welding hard boxes, I finally have the skill and time to build what I dream. Welding is my most refined skill, based on the sheer number of hours I have spent under my helmet manipulating the puddle. I created this sculptural style out of a love for my trade and a need to visually express what I was experiencing. Although I had built sculpture in the past, now, after so many years doing it as a job, it felt natural to use the weld as my language. Investigating what kinds of surfaces and materials could hold my experimental projects, I started to try and do exactly what they engineer welding not to do. I wanted to build up the surface with less penetration of the weld body; to create drops of steel dew I could later paint. I found that 1/8” mild steel rolled wire could be cold curved, layered, and welded into forms that seemed too delicate to exist mid-air, suspended. In construction, many of the things we build are based on a square, a 90 degree everything. This is very human and efficient with the tools we utilize. Once I started building emulating the patterns of nature, however, I realized that nothing would be square. I struck out alone, leaving the tools behind and worked only by my own eye, what I saw to be harmonious or real to the thing I was creating. Most of my sculptures average around eight hundred hours to realize. Throughout my career, fabricating helped to guide the structures, as I learned and understood the parameters for strength and had the knowledge to add internal mechanics from my days maintaining heavy equipment. I hoped to evolve the surfaces of the sculptures to a place away from the steel look we are all used to. To keep a memory of the medium, I eventually settled on semi-transparent metallic pigments in clear automotive paint, layered between six and twenty times to build up a complex patina on a black first coat.
Light inspires my work, and I use different mediums to capture, block, and diffuse it in order to create more believable objects, sculptures, and installations. Many of my pieces have features that allow them to be displayed in either light or darkness by containing internal light sources. Some can be installed within environments I have created for them, depending on the space available. Two are wall mounted, and one is activated by the viewer through touch and internal mechanics.
Detail is a love and obsession. The closer I get to my inspiration, our surroundings, the more I understand that everything is made up of tiny bits and translucent layers, combining to become what we experience as nature and whole objects. I build intuitively. I study them all intensely in order to upload their patterns and code. I love finding the secret language of the forms I am building, and often they encompass a living entity and I imagine what its drives are. Reproduction in all forms dominates my mind, perhaps because I am a mother. Sometimes I lean more toward the Sci-fi side. I picture how the future could be if we were in harmony and inspired more of our technological design by nature’s systems. A mythical light farm could collect and distribute all the light energy we need without harming our environment.
I enjoy employing Instagram in order to share the process of my builds, where inspiration comes from, and side projects that don’t fit into my more formal website. Or galleries, for that matter. I’ve crafted constantly. From the time I was very young I’ve had multiple projects on the side. When my children were young, our kitchen table was my studio and now that I am a professional artist I have both a welding shop and a craft/design studio under one roof. My side projects have become more and more about research and development; ideas that evolve into concepts and sculptures for my practice as well major installations as the lead to the internationally-recognized Shambhala Music Festival’s sixty-five member site art team.