Kate Price

artistiek onderzoek - community - ecologie

Kate Price is an artist and gardener from Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, currently working and wiggling in Rotterdam. Within her practice is a curiosity towards the maneuvers we make singularly and collectively within our environments. Drawing from her upbringing on a horticultural farm in Australia and present solo and communal gardening activities, she is currently exploring how gardening practices can facilitate moments of exchange, reciprocity and relationship fostering between divergent beings. Her works take form through means of present gestures and gathering and reflecting sensibilities, attempting to honor and pay attention to the embedded actualities that exist within our ecologies, and the multitude of perspectives that entails these. She holds an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute (completed in 2022), and has exhibited projects in group and solo presentations in Australia, the Netherlands, Italy and Sweden, at both institutional and artist-run experimental spaces. Photo: Xiaofeini Liu


Spring-Up! Robustly Tender Notes, Shop called LIFE, 2023 - Exhibition of ceramics and accompanying reading with Shop called LIFE, hosted at the allotment garden community Spoortuin in Rotterdam. A series of stoneware ceramics detailing an ensemble of information and stories about particular plant 'weed' species were nestled in amongst the garden plots. An accompanying reading took place in which the audience was wandered through the garden to the locations of different ceramics, reading aloud the narratives inscribed upon them. Stemming from and inverting the idea of a basic plant label, which generally hold little information more than their common or botanic name, these pieces aim to weave a diverse range of narratives and perspectives of the plant’s traditional uses, appearances, growing capabilities, cultural histories, and personal stories upon one large plane, with words jostling for position as they push out to the marker’s boundaries. These pieces focus upon sidelined plants, 'weeds' as we often describe them, which are important players in maintaining the intertwined biodiversities of our ecosystems, assisting in soil renewal, providing invaluable food sources for others and having many other beneficial qualities. Whilst they are beings often shrouded in the invasive rhetoric, perhaps there is more to them, should we choose to spend some time to look a little closer, to get to know them a little better. Photo: Silvia Arenas
Investigating: Humus communities in Rotterdam, research residency period, Goethe Institut Rotterdam, Feb-Apr 2023 - Together with Guillem S. Arquer, this three month collaborative research residency aimed to work with the collective knowledge of the peoples of Rotterdam involved in compost making in order to learn from their positive relationships with soil. This project constituted an attempt to raise awareness of the potential of city generated organic waste as an important and beneficial medium through which to re-evaluate the relationship between human and more-than-human agencies in urban ecologies. This research project involved a mapping of and site visits to Rotterdam collectives involved in compost making. During these visits, focus was placed on the composting facilities of these sites, following their branchings and leakages to learn more about the stories, people, knowledges and ideas that sustain these green cracks of the urban. Documentation amassed alongside these introductions formed an archive of conversations, notes, soundscapes, video, drawings, photographs, compost and soil samples: a symbolic and literal Rotterdam humus. Alongside research conducted on location, studio based material-medium experimentations were explored to develop potential ways of relating and sharing compost. This process of site-visiting and studio incubating enabled their “studio compost” to be continually fed, as we became its maintainers in reflective dialogue with the pile’s knowledge accumulations. During the residency period a group reading session titled 'sharing humusities' took place for the Art Central Rotterdam XL 2023 weekend, and a public end presentation was held in April to detail our experiences. Photo: Silvia Arenas
placing the seed, disssspersing the seeds, a composition of toings and froings, as part of This is reality: and it was but a chat away, Graduation Exhibition of the Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art class of 2022, Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam 2022 - Multi-disciplinary presentation of divergent 'seeded' promptings and situated reflections as experienced within gardening contexts to explore how gardening practices can facilitate moments of exchange, reciprocity and relationship fostering. Of ongoing interest is how divergent stories and knowledges can embed themselves in these moments, where actions, spoken words, reflectivity, history and memory intermingle. Photo: Steven Maybury
rotting tomato tactics, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam 2021 - This work was formed in relation to a tomato seed saving technique learned from my Mother. Video documentation of the process of re-enacting the technique are coupled with an audio piece of auto melodic speak-singing, in which memories of the family farm and tomato crops are sat alongside reflections of current sittings with tomatoes, the lineages of their varieties and the people that these engagements are experienced with. Painted works detail renderings of the resultant seed sheets, their watery messy actualities reflected in the fleeting application of paint on paper, installed alongside the dried collected tomato plants, the residual remains of the previous Summer. Within this installation is an assembling of familial teachings, community sharing and an ode to seasonal engagements within garden food cultivation.
Bedrock Residency, as part of GIBCA extended program, KKV Bohuslän, Sweden, October 2021 – residency and group exhibition - Two week residency period working at the artist workshops KKV in Bohuslän, Sweden as part of GIBCA extended program. The residency culminated in a group exhibition of the work each participants had formed during their time at KKV. I engaged with the screenprinting and ceramics workshops to develop an artist note book and ceramic floral motifs that were installed in the exhibition on wooden working benches (used by stonemasons at KKV) together with objects and flora gleaned from the local area.
Introduction to composting, workshop organised and conducted with Guillem S. Arquer, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, August 2021 - Workshop held to introduce and explain our newly formed compost structure to the PZI community, culminating in a lunch prepared from produce of our communal garden. Photo by Steven Maybury
Glasshouse exchange project, VTV Streven naar Verbetering, Rotterdam West, Feb – Oct 2021 (still hanging about sometimes) - Seed and plant exchange project facilitated from the communal glasshouse of allotment garden complex Streven naar Verbetering located in Rotterdam West. People from the gardens were invited to pass plants or seeds onto me that were then sown and grown to a size ready for leaving the protection of the glasshouse, at which point their community was encouraged to take a plant back to their own garden. Upon commencing the project in early 2021 the glasshouse was a site of little activity, though by the Summer it was aglow of busy endeavours and energy, a communal hub to which the gardeners were continually dropping plants off to me, or checking what exciting things were available to re-home to their plots. Within the glasshouse was also grown a garden in the open soil containing pieces of the plants given to me, becoming a mapping of the species gifted during the duration of the project.
sunbed, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam 2021 - Watercolor and gouache on paper, timber, sun yellow outdoor furniture paint, transcripts of conversations between the artist and her Mother discussing gardening practices from different locations in the world (Rotterdam and Melbourne). Photo by Steven Maybury
Do you remember your little treasures, I cut back the chicory and it’s a sea of oxalis – will do more tomorrow, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam 2021 - Watercolor and gouache on paper, acrylic and glue on cardboard. Photo by Steven Maybury
My brothers are good at building things but I’m pretty okay at laying bricks, C3 Contemporary Art Space, Abbotsford, 2019 – solo exhibition - Watercolour and gouache on paper, acrylic on cardboard. Photo by Aaron Christopher Rees