Kate Kucharski Lancashire, United Kingdom
Hi I’m Kate. I generally use a wide range of media to draw, paint and sculpt my work. I also tend towards abstract or realistic with occasional pieces in the middle ground. Ever since I fell ill with hashimoto’s my life has been one medical battlefield to another. I nearly lost my life three times. Now I’m a Zebra (Ehlers Danlos Syndrome) and am finally back doing something I love, creating.
When I first started seriously creating I was exploring a series of work based on the seven deadly sins in my sixth form at school. I started making abstract forms from just about anything I could get my hands on and resulted in corsets inspired by each sin using abstract forms to communicate how each sin feels. I loved it. It was a true solace from the pain I was experiencing.
Unfortunately my life was threatened by my medical conditions at this point and everything had to be put on hold.
After a year I went to college to do a foundation level in art and design. Here I was free to use my imagination to express myself. This came in the form of plaster sculptures using protective materials such as bubble wrap and packing peanuts and casts of hands which had been deformed using bubbles nails and broken plaster rubble, hundreds of abstract prints from forms resembling spines and hands and drawings of forms found in close ups of my sculptures and paintings. This body of work was inspired by artist such as: Sir Antony Gormley and Rachel Whiteread and design studio MATSYS. This was also a discovery into the world of the deepest parts of the ocean and the life that has managed to thrive there. The sheer ingenuity of life and the adaptations it has created with these creatures that look like they are from another world. In a sense, they are. I also created jewellery aiming to work on the idea of armour, of things that could hold me together.
Then I began an exploration after this into the new world of creatures I had come across while working. I used the forms of these amazing creatures to inspire abstract forms in my drawing. I also furthered my emotion-based questions with a series of rorschach tests using questions such as ‘do you love me?’ and statements exploring other ideas of emotion. These then became abstract blots of black paint. I then began to collect data in what others could see, whether they felt positive looking at the image or negative and seeing that some people felt the opposite of the emotion behind the image, some felt the same and others felt other emotions outside of the original intention. It was fascinating.
Again my passion had to take a backseat after this through more medical drama but thankfully I am working again. I have begun to enjoy painting realistic projects such as skulls both animal and human and a painting of the ocean which was inspired by Ray Collins’ photography. I also have begun a project illustrating the 78 tarot cards.
Art has been my saviour through everything. It has been what I turn to when life is difficult and where I celebrate happiness. I am a Zebra (someone with the condition Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder) and I have disautonomia, hashimoto’s and various other things but I’m alive and use the emotions of this difficult and happy to create hope in my art and to ask questions, even when I don’t always get any answers.
