”There’s this regenerative capacity in our bodies, that’s not a magical thing, it’s just how our biology works, but there are great mysteries attached to that. There’s a sense of the body wanting to heal itself and adapt” shared SICK AF artist Kate Campbell-Pope.
On a cool, drizzly day in Djeran, we caught up with Kate at her home in Kinjarling to learn more about her journey as an artist. She shared with us her background in Occupational Therapy, and her deep fascination with the human body and its capacity for healing. We touched on loss, trauma and grief, and the therapeutic and transformative nature of both artmaking and gardening.
Image credit: Kate Campbell-Pope in her home studio and garden. Photography by Nic Duncan.
Kate has always been drawn to slower, tactile art and craft processes. “My grandmother taught me how to crochet and knit when I was about eight” she said. “So I was very drawn to textiles, stitching and making little dolls. I would also collect clay from a hill near our house and spend hours making horses and camels and all sorts of stuff”.
“I innately felt the need to create. There was this terrible Kraft cheese you could get that was very sculptural, a perfect kind of playdough consistency. I’d sit there playing with it until it went grey! I think being quite an anxious kid, I always needed something to do with my hands. Look, I still do it” she said with a laugh, showing us a collection of tiny sculptures that she has fashioned from silver foil wrappers.
Kate was encouraged by her mother, a commercial artist and teacher, to embrace her creativity. “I was allowed to work with clay at the family’s big oak dining table, the same table mum might cut fabric on, and serve our meals at. Mum also introduced me to kids’ courses at Albany Summer School, where I did things like plaster casting”.
As a young adult, however, and following in the footsteps of her father who was a doctor, Kate began studies in Occupational Therapy. “It was presented to me as a good option as mum knew an OT assistant who took paint pots to kids in hospital, which sounded okay to me!” she said. “It offered me so much interesting learning, particularly anatomy and physiology, which I’ve continued to explore over the years through my art practice”.
While studying, Kate met artist Nalda Searles through an Albany Summer School basketry workshop, sparking a lifetime friendship. “Nalda has been an incredibly supportive mentor for many years, and introduced me to a way of working directly with materials to create form and story” Kate said. She then undertook ‘four years of first year art training’ at three different institutions; Claremont School of Art, Curtin University, Albany, and Edith Cowan University, where she majored in Textiles, and began to explore sculpture more deeply.
“Sculpture has a life to it. It’s more real in the world somehow” Kate said. “It’s the tactility I respond to; the feeling of fashioning something through the hands, the sense of the material, its properties and possibilities, and the excitement of bringing something unknown into existence”.
Kate works with materials she stumbles upon, inherits, or grows herself. “I am terribly bothered by waste, and am a natural collector and rescuer of materials” she said, showing us an amorphous collection of fruit stickers stuck to her pantry door; a practice she has been keeping for more than ten years. “I find plastic horribly fascinating; in terms of the future archeology we are creating”.
She loves to work with grass, a material which to her, speaks of ubiquity, fragility and ephemerality. “I’m currently growing New Zealand Flax and a local Pimelia along the back fence. I like using all sorts of natural fibre, treating it like a piece of clay, manipulating and stitching it into place” she said. “Fibre is what we are made of, in our muscles, tendons and bones. These resonances, between our corporeal selves and the broader ecology, have always struck me as magnificent”.
For Kate, it’s about the relationship between material and meaning. For example, her works in SICK AF were constructed with textiles from her father’s medical practice, and together connect several points in time in relation to the loss of her sister, Madeleine.
“Madeleine had a car accident a few years before she died, where she fractured a cervical vertebra. She was really lucky that it was a stable fracture, and she made a full recovery. It was quite amazing. So bandage and gauze from Dad’s medical collection felt like obvious materials to use in making the piece Recovery” she said.
Tragically, Madeleine took her own life a couple of years later. “The presence of suicide in my family has a very deep and profound imprint” Kate explained. “I’ve lost two sisters in sudden and devastating ways. The other sister Mariana died when I was twenty-one. I was young and had no idea how to process such overwhelming grief, so I didn’t start to do any real healing until ten years on, when I met quite a remarkable grief counsellor”.
This counsellor encouraged her to follow her creative impulses while processing her sister’s death; to make art, or set up a shrine, whatever it was she needed. “That just set something off. I eventually found my way to a whole body of work about hands, very connected to Mariana. It was deeply therapeutic to work with grief in such a deliberate way” she said.
“When Madeleine died, I was just so distraught. I would go into the studio and not know what to do. I had her photo right there in front of me, and I just started to construct an amorphous object with wire and bandage and netting”.
“It didn’t have to become anything, it was just that power of one stitch after another, and engaging with the body, time and movement in some way. It’s a reflective but focused sort of making, allowing things to gradually take shape”. Through this process, Collect, a strange, porous heart shaped vessel, began to emerge.
All the Leaves in My Garden, a calico arm sling which belonged to her father, delicately embroidered with leaves, was made another ten years on. “For me, the sling was already imbued with a sense of Dad’s gentle healing, onto which I wanted to stitch the leaves of growth for my own healing capacity”.
Image credit: Kate Campbell-Pope in her home studio and garden. Photography by Nic Duncan.
“In sharing these works, I have the chance to impart something hopefully meaningful and resonant; the power of the creative process in helping to move us through time, and gradually begin to integrate and heal such deep psychic shocks which can occur in our lives”.
Kate had just installed new work, Adapt and overcome I and Adapt and overcome II, in The Shining, a group exhibition at Albany Town Hall. “This was the first show in a number of years that I’ve devoted a substantial bit of time to, because I did have a bit of a break from art making” she said. “That year after COVID, when everything bounced back so suddenly, I was in five group shows, running workshops, working as an OT, and it was just all a bit much!”.
Around this time, Kate also developed Laryngeal Dystonia, a rare movement disorder which affects the vocal cords. “Stress has a major effect on this condition, in relation to voice control and quality. Because of this, and the intensity of working in aged care as an Occupational Therapist throughout COVID, I decided to give up OT. Deciding to deregister was interesting in terms of my identity, and it took a little while for this to settle and feel comfortable.”
“I’ve worked with people in the past, who lost their voice through various neuromuscular conditions, so I kind of understood it from that perspective, but now I’ve experienced it for myself. The invitation to SICK AF came when I was struggling to come to terms with this and what that meant to my life, so it felt great to address that in an exhibition”.
Since undertaking a Permaculture course during COVID, gardening has been a huge focus for Kate, and a means to navigate these changes. “I really discovered the gardener in me” she said. “I find it to be an incredibly hopeful activity, with so much daily discovery and delight”.
Community, too, has been vital for Kate, and for the last thirty-five years she has belonged to a couple of dedicated stitching groups in both Albany and Perth. “We come together to work on projects, share stories, food, books, produce, or walks. We talk, laugh and cry together. It feels like family. It’s enriching, and deeply meaningful to me” she said.
Kate continues to work as a mentor for several artists living with disability, where she’s been able to bring her Occupational Therapist and artist self together. Reflecting on her journey, Kate shared “I’ve been witness to how people manage to deal with a great interruption to their life, be it an accident, traumatic event, cumulative stress, or the onset of a chronic health condition, disability or ageing. I have been very humbled to have so many stories of lives shared with me, of adversity, difficulty, but also of great forbearance, resilience, and so often humour”.
You can see Kate’s work in the exhibition SICK AF as it tours across regional WA. Find out more about the exhibition here.
Story written by Kristen Brownfield