Kate Giles grew up in Norwich. Having read English at Oxford she trained at Camberwell and Falmouth Schools of Art. She has exhibited regularly ever since, particularly in London and East Anglia but also internationally. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections in the UK and abroad (e.g. The Britten Pears Foundation, Banco Sabadell). Exhibitions have arisen from a number of residencies and commissions (e.g. National Theatre, Whitechapel Bell Foundry, Kazan Cathedral, St Petersburg). Her work has, for many years, focused on a keen and intimate vision of her native East Anglia.

Artist Statement

Drawing on the spot intensively is the groundwork of all that I later paint. It feeds on the specifics of particulars: tree, field, angle, light, shadow; alert to the weathering of the year; a vital initial response to the seized moment. Back in the studio, painting is to digest, remake, discover and unearth. The subject becomes, not so much the object, as what resonates between memory, presence and the feeling at the time. Francis Bacon wondered how possible it was in a painting to ‘catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of making’. He knew that ‘by some accidental brush marks, suddenly appearance comes in with a vividness that no accepted way of doing it would have brought about’ Admiring Cezanne for his ‘courage to put down what he didn’t see’ Roger Hilton aimed at work that would ‘swing out into the void’, into a so called ‘not as yet’. Constable felt that painting was simply ‘another word for feeling’ (his passionate ‘language of the heart’). The seen as unseen. Keenly aware of the inheritance of Dutch and English landscape traditions, for me Constable remains a lifelong taproot and lodestar. He declared his ‘limited and abstracted art’ to be ‘found under every hedge and every lane’, one alert to a deep physical engagement with embodied life. Surely this conviction and urgency of response is what inhabits ‘knowing something by heart’ and must lie behind Bacon’s mystery as to how appearance can come in within the mystery of making.

Training and education

1997 - 98, 2014 - 15
Printmaking and Life Drawing, Morley College.

1994 - 1995
University of Brighton, PGCE, Art & Design.

1987 - 1990
Falmouth School of Art and Design, BA Hons Fine Art.

1986 - 1987
Camberwell College of Art and Design, Foundation.

1985
Printmaking, John Cass School of Art, London.

1981 - 1984
New College, Oxford, English Literature, BA Hons.