Warwick Arts Centre’s Mead Gallery will undergo a major transformation this month, with visual artist Katrina Palmer’s exhibition, What’s Already Going On, set to be housed in a specially created university corridor within the gallery space…

London-born visual artist Katrina Palmer works in a variety of mediums ranging from the written word to audio recordings and moving images, but has always maintained a passion for sculpture - albeit in an abstract way. Rather than focusing on objects, her art is often more concerned with the space the sculptures take up, the space that surrounds them and the space they leave behind.

Her latest, and largest commission to date continues that theme. It brings a variety of new work, including unfired clay sculptures, drawings and movies, all under one roof - or, to be more precise, all along one university corridor - in the Mead Gallery at Coventry’s Warwick Arts Centre. 

Inspired by hallways in Warwick University’s Department of Philosophy, What’s Already Going On is presented in a specially constructed corridor that offers visitors access to rooms housing Katrina’s artwork, but often with a degree of separation - that space which she finds so fascinating.

“Part of what’s always driven me, even when I was writing, is the edges of things,” she explains. “I did a lot of work where I was often defining holes and voids and spaces, and making people walk around the edges of near boundaries and things like that. Rather than focusing on objects directly, I was looking at standing to the side of spaces, if that makes sense.

“That’s what I’ve carried on doing in this show. There’ll be a corridor that takes you around the edges of the space, and any objects are kept at a distance, so you have to peer through walls to see them.”
It’s refreshing - and not a little endearing - to hear her grasp for the right words to describe what she does, and while the exhibition is designed to challenge the viewer to act in new ways, in order to conquer stereotypes and confront internal resistances, Katrina is quick to point out that the title isn’t just about us not seeing what’s in front of us.

“That’s definitely part of it, I guess,” she says, stressing and elongating the word ‘part’. “I guess I was thinking about what I found in the arts centre and the university - the structures I came across, some of the furnishings, the corridors… just using stuff that was there already. 

“A lot of sculptors do that - use found objects and everyday things in their shows - and that’s partly what I’m referring to in the title. It’s not a criticism of people not seeing things.”

As much as the exhibition questions how we can (and should) do what we want or need to do, rather than what we’re channelled towards or expected to do, Katrina acknowledges that she’s as guilty as anyone of conforming, or defaulting, to type - something she took a rather radical step to try to change.

“Sometimes you just find yourself doing what you always do - you can’t escape that. I’m as guilty of that as the next person. In my last teaching job, because I couldn’t find any time to make my own work, I slept in my office once a week for eight weeks. The only time I made any work was in the middle of the night.”
But this wasn’t ‘work’ in the traditional sense - not even for an artist.

“Basically I taught myself how to throw knives! It’s another thing in the show, films of this clandestine activity. It was a way of cutting through the constraints of time and space… and something that just felt good!”

Katrina claims she got pretty adept at it - visitors to the exhibition can be the judge when they view the film footage - but isn’t quite ready for a career throwing in the direction of human targets at the fairground.
“Oh no!” she laughs. “This was a wet clay target! It was all done in semi-darkness, with me being really tired, so it was a bit dangerous at certain moments!”

The clay targets form a key feature of the exhibition. They were something Katrina was making that she showed to Mead Gallery curator Thomas Ellmer when he first contacted her to talk about the commission. 
That was over a year ago, and since then What’s Already Going On has been named a runner-up for the Freelands Award, which helps UK visual arts organisations put on exhibitions by mid-career women.

Katrina says the prize money of £10,000 will come in handy for building the corridor, and that being on the shortlist gave her “a new sense of freedom” while working on the project. That included “de-centring my writing practice”, she says, as she moved away from the experimental novels that she’s become known for and returned to working with physical objects - although she says there’s a natural link between the two.

“I still see writing as a form of sculpture because I’m interested in all those things that people might associate with sculpture, like an interesting memorial, or a body, or physicality, things like that. I put all those ideas into storytelling rather than making things in a more conventional way.”

Avoiding convention is an intrinsic part of her art, and although Katrina aims to confront what she, or the viewer, expects her to do, she knows everything remains subjective and personal to the individual. 
“That’s exactly it - it’s good to push back against some of the things that people think I’m going to do with the work, but also what I think I’m capable of. Right now it’s about learning something new and working with this cool form in an academic space.”

And creating space for the viewer - rather than the art - remains a driving force, even though she struggles to fully articulate it. She laughs again when I point out how difficult she finds talking about her own art, even though she must regularly discuss everyone else’s while teaching.
“I know! I don’t spend a lot of time talking about my own work, especially just before an exhibition when you don’t quite know what it is, and what it’s going to feel like.

“I think [the space element] is more of an experience or a feeling - you might feel a little bit constrained, or pressure, but also at times… maybe a bit excited? I guess it’s about reproducing some of the feelings that I’ve had in different spaces - there’s a lot of frustration but also some excitement as well.”

by Steve Adams

What’s Already Going On shows at Warwick Arts Centre’s Mead Gallery from Thursday 12 January to Sunday 12 March