Kate Braine

"When I see Kate's signature slashing motif, I always recall the terrifying scene from Le Chien Andalou, the 1932 collaboration between Dali and Bunuel which opens with a human eye being slashed by a razor. It is these similar night fears and fairy tales, the deep dark forests of Peter and the Wolf, or the child catcher's sinister but yet balletic gate, or so obviously John Wydham's triffids, that informs the fearsome, yet the beauty and delicacy of Kate's pottery.

 

"Kate's kiln is located in an old Turkish bath house at the bottom of her Cheyne Row garden. A stone's throw from where 250 years earlier Josiah Wedgwood established his London Drawing School. The same row as the Victorian potter William de Morgan began to transform Chelsea into a place of interest for London's contemporary artistic and literary world. The studios of Rossetti, Turner's Thames and Whistler's sombre foggy reaches still linger close to Chelsea's quiet back streets and now close by The Saatchi Gallery has joined the conversation. 

 

"There has always been a bohemian creativity in Chelsea. An urge to break with rules or as the great Australian adman and filmmaker Philip Adams said 'The first rule of creativity, is that there are no rules'. 

 

"As Kate says of her work 'I want to push clay to its limits of breakability; sometimes I am amazed that it survive'.

 

"Her vibrant colours arrest the collector. Blood and poppy reds, verdant luminous sea greens, sit convivially next to soft, more traditional creams. A potter's palette inspired by the vats filled with colour glazes in Chris Bamble's studio, where Kate has studied over the last 20 years and by the Venetian glass sculpture of Napoleone Martinzorri. Kate's latest work is still steeped in a Chelsea tradition: a potter's pantry, rolling out giant pastry-like slabs of clay decorated with Victorian butter and Art Deco presses, shortbread cutters, biscuit cutters, wooden spoons and chopsticks too. Craft meets Art and it soars.

 

"For Kate, the joy of being a potter is akin to being in love. As she would add 'The joy of pottery is nothing turns out exactly the way you think it will. It is the excitement of "the accident", the process and acceptance of the unknown.'

 

- Nick Crean