Kate Fitzpatrick: Echo Impressions

Fenwick Gallery is pleased to present Kate Fitzpatrick, a graduating School of Art’s MFA Candidate this semester, with her pop up show Echo Impressions as an amuse-bouche to her upcoming Thesis exhibition. Her show was originally scheduled for last semester but due to COVID-19 it was pushed back until now. We are happy to feature her work to reopen our space, and celebrate her accomplishment during these trying times!

Artist Statement

Signs can take the form of words, images, sounds, body gestures, and objects which play a crucial part in the social construction of our reality. We take understanding these signs for granted and don’t often think about how we come to understand these signs, or if others can understand the signs we use. All signs communicate something that we may or may not understand based on our own culture and experiences. My work centers around my own sign system to create interpretive spaces filled with unknown letter forms. Repetitive glyphs appear as mantras or broken language, glyphs gather and float away to reveal new worlds.

This series of layered drawings is inspired by palimpsests. Palimpsests reveal a collection of partial images or words through a history of marks on its own surface. As an early method of recycling surfaces for writing and images, they were erased, scraped or washed away to make room for new scrawl and images. Only made on a single surface, the layers hint at an archive of altered history where visible traces of the past are present.

Palimpsests have a direct relationship to the day to day veneer that covers the meaning of words and images we encounter. The removal, crossing out, erasing, and overwriting of our words and images reshapes the meaning of our language systems and opens up the possibility for multiple meanings to live in the remnants of our “readable” surfaces. The meaning of images and words lie somewhere in the interplay of the spaces between.