Kate Southworth
Kate Southworth is an Irish-British artist based in St Ives. Her work unfolds as a cosmology that interweaves painting, drawing, ritual, and symbolic enquiry. Rooted in co-creation with veiled beings, herbs, and cosmic landscapes, she invites aspects of the sensed-unseen into fragile form.
Her paintings emerge through elemental processes, often hovering between appearance and dissolution. She positions painting as a field of becoming, where material and spiritual processes co-emerge and the soul traces its own transformation. Fragments gather into provisional constellations that evolve across exhibitions, books, talks, courses, and events.
Her work is supported by practice-based research, including a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds, and has been presented nationally and internationally. She has delivered talks at Tate St Ives, Tate Modern, and Tate Britain.
“My work gives form to psyche’s transformation; inviting subtle presences and unseen dimensions into material expression. Drawing on parsemage, planchette work, dream-based methods, and somatic listening, I attend to thresholds between conscious and unconscious registers. Herbs such as mugwort, valerian, and yarrow serve as ritual companions, opening passageways into imaginal and otherworld realms.
Paintings develop through encounters with liminal space and felt energy. Some arise as raw, intuitive forms or nascent patterns; others articulate symbolic terrains through geometry or cosmic landscape. Certain works function as interfaces: orienting fragments into temporary constellations.
In my parsemage works, powdered charcoal is sprinkled onto the surface of water. Paper is passed beneath, catching the swirls and flows of pigment. The resulting images index the movement of water itself—its folding pools and shifting densities. Parsemage enacts a subtle elemental choreography, aligning material, chance, and otherworld presence. These works resist intentional composition, instead acting as thresholds where images surface through relational encounter between spirit and matter.
My work unfolds as a cosmology: an evolving field where fragments, images, rituals, and texts circulate and co-transform. These fragments gather in provisional constellations that take form through exhibitions, events, books, and an unfolding digital space. Informed by feminist reconfigurations of alchemy and distributed systems, my practice resists fixed stages or conclusions. It sustains a mutable field of enquiry through which the soul experiences its own transformation.”
For more information on Kate’s art visit her website
Selected Exhibitions
2025 Tranceducers: Art of Visionaries, Mediums and Automatists, GPS Gallery, Soho, London
2025 The order of the Sun and Moon: In the Land of the Living Stones, Crypt Gallery, St Ives
2024 The Order of the Sun and Moon, The College of Psychic Studies, London
2023 The Order of the Sun and Moon: St Ives. Crypt Gallery, St Ives
2022 Scattered, online exhibition of paintings, spells and rituals (solo show)
2022 Co-emergence in Isolation, online exhibition of paintings, spells and rituals (solo show)
2020 Alchemy, Occult, Esoteric Practices, Interalia Magazine (drawings)
2019 Fertile Darkness, The Fish Factory Art Space, Penryn (solo show)
2019 WEB-RETRO, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea
2018 Alimentary Diets, Leonorana Magazine (poetic text)
2016 Painting and Painting, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives (two person show)
2016 Midpointness, Airspace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent
2016 Midpointness online exhibition for TransArt Triennale
2016 Café Morte, Falmouth Project Space, Falmouth University.
2015 Myoculture, Site Festival, Stroud
2014 Unsettled, Enys House and Gardens, Penryn
2014 Embedded, Enys House and Gardens, Penryn
2013 The Dark Rooms, CAST, Helston