Kate Whyles: What is Curatorship?
The infamous Sensation exhibition, held at The Royal Academy of Arts in 1997, showcased contemporary artists including many YBA's from the Saatchi collection. It had a radical focus which was a deliberate side step from British artists struggling to properly step into the role of the zeitgeist. It became a phenomenon that made art feel accessible to the British people and landed the UK firmly on the global stage, for installation art in particular.
One of the things that made the phenomenon possible was that the usual financial and logistical barriers presented to emerging artists were removed because they had the financial backing of exorbitantly wealthy patrons; Jay Jopling and Charles Saatchi. Both collectors in competition with one another to more elaborately support the new talent they patronized.
This gave her the opportunity to move within the art world, and soon after she won a curatorship role for the Gilbert and George, The Dirty Words Pictures at The Serpentine Gallery in 2002.
After this adventure, she returned to Nottingham and founded the This is Art gallery space on Stoney Street; a DIY gallery for emerging artists. The space had originally been a post office and was derelict. It was an enormous building that needed a lot of renovation. But she remained unfazed and determined, collaborating with local artists and friends to transform the space into a safe and functional gallery. She filled it with students/ peers artwork. For many it was the first time that they had publicly exhibited. And they started selling pieces. The people they were selling to were everyday people, not art collectors, shifting the paradigm of 'who should and does buy art'.
The space went well for 2 years. And then Kate decided she wanted to expand. She put on experimental and immersive event in the gallery called Little Wolf Parade, booking local artists like Rachael Parry and collaborating with arts organisations like I'm Not From London and Left Lion. They sold out within hours of releasing the tickets and the event was a huge success. It sounds like it was a transgressive and avante garde event, with pigs heads, shot glasses full of blood, blindfolded audience members and vomit. It makes me wonder if it would be possible to do something like that now. Whether or not it would be, it is testament to the fact that being rebellious and generating curiosity around exhibitions can generate success and notoriety. As an artist interested in transgression, I can't help but ponder the consequences of being so rebellious so early on in your career. Do you end up in a race to the bottom with yourself? How do you meet your audiences expectations of ever increasing shock value? Where do you go after you've drunk pigs blood until you vomit everywhere? All food for thought.
After Little Wolf Parade, Kate started working in a gallery as a curator at the gallery Castle Fine Arts, selling what she termed as "naïve art". Despite her financial success, she got a fed up selling art commercially in this way and left the gallery when they started curating pieces by Johnny Depp.
Since then, Kate has been studying and teaching digital art and creatuve tech. She is about to start a PhD on the impacts of AI on the art world. She is returning to her own practise and hopes to put on an exhibition in the next few years that explore her areas of interest.
