Katie is a visual artist originally from West Dunbartonshire, now living in Dundee. She looks at themes of religion, sectarianism, gender, class, devotion and the domestic space. She graduated from the Edinburgh College of art in 2020 with a BA(hons) in Intermedia, before graduating from DJCAD in 2022 which an MFA in Arts and Humanities. She lives in Dundee with many dying houseplants where she is the MUM of DAD (the Dundee Artists Database).

See Katie’s work as part of our annual Spring open call, Keep Your Eye on the Doughnut, Not the Hole, which runs April 3rd to 24th, featuring an incredible collection of art by thirty artists leaning into joy, curiosity, and the often surreal pleasure of focusing on what is rather than what isn’t, in a myriad of mediums.

Hi Katie! Tell us how your artistic journey started!
I think drawing was a really low cost way my mum could keep us entertained, I liked the physicality of, like, different strokes and lines from pulling or pushing the pencil and depending on which finger you put the most pressure on or were lightest on. I was about 5 when my auntie bought my mum a video of Tutti Frutti which is largely based in GSA, she told me we’d driven past it and it was an art school and told me what an art school was and that was my goal all through school. On the other side of art school I do think its over hyped but I’m quite happy with my decisions. My mum’s a big hippy and always really supportive and I had really good teachers in primary and secondary who took drawing and being creative very seriously and I think they were a big part of what kept me going as well.

How did you arrive at the theme of your work?
I had always been interested in gender and devotional materialism well before I knew what they were. I think I was always interested in things that are creepy but you can’t put your finger on why, just slightly creepy but not quite uncanny. I think also being a woman in Scotland can be really frustrating when issues like sectarianism, religion and class are so focussed on men, women have always been there also experiencing these things and I basically cook an animosity for the idea that men are the figureheads for Scottish culture and history into the work. By nature I’m secretly quite spiteful and I hold a grudge quite well and I leave little pieces of grudges all round the place in my work so if you feel like something is watching you it probably is. But their maleficent powers will stop when my grudges stop so it’s not all bad.

Can you walk us through your creative process?
Generally, I start with a feeling or an image in my head and I just follow it. Sometimes it feels very connected to a feeling or a physical sensation, sometimes and object or a texture or a sound, sometimes to a temperature or a shape or a physical movement, sometimes I don’t know what it is but I know that it’s there and I just go through my wee rolodex of feelings and colours and shapes and different gestures with pencil or paintbrushes until I feel like I’m getting closer to it. Sometimes it disgusts me, sometimes its something that excites me, a few times its been something that has bored me so much that I’ve convinced myself there must be something interesting about it and just dig at it that way. I just allow myself to follow it, whatever it is, I just try to carve out time in my day, even if I’m on the bus, I’m thinking about how the pigs hat is smooth and jaggy and convince myself that this is a microcosm of a more sinister being. Sometimes it doesn’t come out looking great but I think as long as you’re following your own nose there’s been no time wasted. You can always go back and sharpen up the edges as long as the jist of it is authentic to you, even if it’s something that only you find interesting, or boring, or disgusting or whatever, people can tell.

How has your practice changed over time?
My practice previously consisted of drawing on plates, of interactive sculptures and some film work. In undergrad I had like a Hannah Montana practice where I had stuff my tutors liked but I hated, and stuff that sold well but the commissions were driving me mental because they were getting more and more personalised to the buyers and less true to what I wanted to make. I felt like this was a waste of time at the time but it definitely taught me how to say no to people even when I was very very skint, and how to bite the bullet and make work to pay the bills because I was very very skint. I think my practice has grown with me, and changed as my attitude to work and labour and myself changed. I used to want to be a specific artist but now I’m happy to make anything as long as I’m happy and following my nose.

How do you overcome creative blocks?
I think you allow yourself to be jealous and hateful and spiteful when you see other people getting what you want – keep it to yourself and don’t be a dick, but like feel those feelings and register them as signposts to what you want. I think also these negative feelings are something people often stifle, but they’re natural, and as long as you’re stifling any part of your brain, you can’t be surprised that you have a creative block. Sometimes it’s also helpful to pretend you’re speaking to someone else about it, or looking at someone else’s work. I think often creative block is actually imposter syndrome in disguise, and it’s not so much I can’t but maybe a scared-ness that you’re getting too close to what you want to achieve and you’re experiencing some “I don’t deserve it”.

What advice would you give to artists who are just starting out?
Find a community and use your spidey senses to clock when people have rich parents: they’re not more productive than you, they are just gainfully unemployed and living off mum and dad. Also you can get books and brushes and mostly everything for cheaper on Ebay if you type it in with a common misspelling (or just normal still lots of bargains). Don’t worry about being perfect or good or whatever, make it like no-one’s going to see it, and if people do see it you can allow yourself to feel happy or proud but you can’t base your self esteem on it. Get a hobby that you can be shit at, and make a space for yourself to be shit at something and welcome being shit at it, then when you’re shit at something you think is a big deal you’ve already tricked your brain into seeing being shit as not a big deal.

 What emotions or reactions do you hope viewers experience when they see your artwork?
Ideally I hope they feel threatened, watched and vaguely religious, but not galvanised enough to do anything about it. I think that is the experience of Catholicism that you feel like aw I think I’m going to burn for ever for that and then you kind of think oh well and get on with your day. I suppose I’m micro-dosing people with catholicism but not in a colonising kind of way – although is there such a thing – in a kind of beware of cultural backwash of religion kind of way. The work doesn’t scream that it is about religion or sectarianism so I hope people feel confused and maybe dismissive of the work. I quite like that it’s kind of art imitating life, like you think you’ve dismissed an object but you’re actual an integral part of it’s life cycle as a devotional object. If they don’t feel any of these things I’m not fussed, I can just pretend they do.

Can you elaborate on the significance or symbolism of the chosen title of
your work?
I think I just called it Pig because its part of a bigger body of work that’s still largely in progress. The symbolism or at least the themes that I’m researching are to do with every day objects being weaponised by themes and ideologies present in the domestic space. For my masters thesis I wrote and made work about devotional materialism which is basically objects which aren’t religious but also not totally secular, essentially people projecting religiosity onto objects. In my masters I spoke about a sliding scale where these objects could slide up and down in religiosity and where the tipping points of each section would be, I like to find objects that really sit on the line, and depending on your day or whatever you’re thinking about they could sliding more up or down the scale and that gives them a kind of maleficent aliveness. I think in this way when we project onto them, they project onto us threw the kind of power we’ve given them, and as much as we look at them they look at us. They can survey us while we’re dismissive of them and maybe in that way they’re very polis-adjacent and maybe that’s why I called it Pig? In my thesis as well I spoke about how gender and class are such massive components to the manifestation of sectarianism in Scotland, I think we speak a lot about how men of different religions were horrible to each other and not how women often experienced a religious hatred from men on both sides, and I don’t think we’ll ever be really rid of sectarianism until we speak about it properly which won’t happen unless we do interrogate it from women and queer people’s points of view and take their experiences into account.

Will your next project be a continuation of your current style or are you experimenting with something different?
I’ll probably be looking at the same themes until I die, I really love domestic spaces and things that are nearly eerie but not quite but stick in your mind anyways, and I’m definitely not done research and making work about devotional materialism and Scotland, and I think gender and class will always be a part of my work because they’re so unavoidable in my life. I’m making a body of work just now where I’m allowing myself to really indulge and be a bit greedy and gluttonous and really sink in to all the yucky feelings we have and try to make more kind of creepy work, I’m having a lot of fun with it – and with the not creepy paintings too, I like to mix them up so no-one knows which is what.

Find out more about Katie’s work on her website or Instagram. Keep Your Eye on the Doughnut, Not the Hole runs at Six Foot Gallery until Thursday 24th April 2025.