Kate Owens
...photographer, artist, writer exploring mental health...
...works...
The Echo Series
The Echo Series, published in September 2024, is three books, each rooted in memoir, but different from the others in form. The first, A Book about Life, is a coming of age fictionalised memoir; Inventory, is a book of photographs and quotations; and the final book, Rosemary, documents my mother's decline into early onset Alzheimers Disease in diary extracts which, over the course of the book, crystallise into a number of poems. All of the books, in part, stem from my obsession with photography from the age of fifteen.. Although the three books form a series, each one functions as a self-contained work in its own right. I have always loved paperbacks and the idea that between the covers, a whole world can be brought to life. I hope very much that I have managed to achieve this work.
A Book About Life
Everyone has a story. This is my story, previously hidden beneath the glossy surfaces of the photographs I took obsessively from the age of fifteen. Frustrated with the ‘bloodless English countryside version of a life,’ I seemed to be enduring, my younger self fervently wishes that her real life begin, complete with ‘love, desire, heartbreak and ecstasy’. Within weeks all is chaos.
This coming-of-age fictionalised memoir explores my troubled relationship with my unpredictable mother, and early relationships with difficult, sometimes frightening men. It takes the reader into a world of small-town crime and the mind of an untethered teenage girl. With photography at its heart, the story moves from the Wye Valley to Dartmoor Prison to the Himalayas of Pakistan, and explores the fall-out from Thatcher’s policies of the eighties and the thrill of the anarchic rave and traveller culture set against the backdrop of a pre-gentrified rural dystopia.
This exhilarating and timely fictionalised memoir is the result of a life spent trying to come to terms with all that was unleashed with a teenage wish, and a celebration of the redemptive power of creativity.
‘As a family we were not so wholesome anymore - we were tarred, marked, and slightly ruined. There was a lot less to live up to, and this brought with it an invigorating sense of oncoming freedom. It was as if the covers had been blown off and, if we all held on tight and gritted our teeth, we would eventually explode into the light.’
Inventory
Inventory is a book of photographs and quotations. The photographs were taken over a twenty year period between 1985 and 2005.
Throughout this time, I took thousands of photographs, many of which formed part of larger quite rigid series, but this disparate collection of pictures tells a wider story. The images roam from the Himalayas in Pakistan, to the Wye Valley, to New York City on 11th September 2001. The quotations are from different texts about photography, from photographic theory to song lyrics to lines from films.
They are the output of a bewildered, sometimes isolated individual, ‘astray in an overwhelming world – mastering reality by a fast visual anthologising of it’. Susan Sontag, On Photography.
Rosemary
Rosemary, based on diary extracts written between 2006 and 2013, is about my mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s Disease, while I was bringing up very young children. The writing begins as lyrical prose but as the book progresses, it becomes more structured, until the last series of texts crystallise into visceral and startling poems written while my mother lay dying.
Whilst writing the diary entries that the text is based on, and as a way of carving out time for myself amid the ‘madness of family life’, I took a large format camera into the woods in the Wye Valley and Forest of Dean where I was living, and took dense photographs of the trees. Set alongside the words, the pictures seemed to link what was at play within my own family with the constant decline and renewal of nature.
I decided to layer the photographs. As one image was superimposed onto the next, nothing was actually lost (in fact every picture in this series contains traces of all of the others) but the photographs begin to lose clear definition. This mirrors the process of Alzheimer’s disease, where rather than being destroyed, memories become indecipherable within a mess of plaques and tangles.
The photograph on the cover is by artist, Neeta Madahar, and was taken as part of her series 'Flora'. It is a portrait of me but the face in the hand mirror I am holding is that of my mother. Titled ‘Kate with Rosemary’, it was taken during the same period that I was documenting the woods and writing about my mother’s illness. The plant Rosemary represents memory in Victorian flower symbolism. Rosemary was also my mother’s christian name although everyone called her by her second name, Ann, and later, Annie. Sadly, as she became more ill and the social and health care systems became more involved in her life, she was increasingly referred to again by the name on her records, Rosemary.
Me and the Black Dog
by Kate Owens & Neeta Madahar
The animation, Me and the Black Dog, comes from the personal perspectives of its two artists, Kate Owens and Neeta Madahar. Commissioned by the Foundation for Creative technology (FACT), Liverpool and Jacqui Davies Limited, it was made with the support of Arts Council England and FACT, Liverpool.
Me and the Black Dog was devised as both a single screen work and a complex installation where sections of the film play on several screens simultaneously in an installation space.
Me and the Black Dog, centres on cultural references within British folklore to ‘the black dog’ as a metaphor for dark, malevolent forces. For example, a Viking legend describes Black Shuck, a ghostly dog roaming the East Anglian countryside, as a portend of death. More recently, ‘the black dog’ has come to symbolise the human psyche’s darker aspects. Winston Churchill referred to his depression as ‘the black dog’ and singer/songwriter Nick Drake interweaved associations between ‘the black dog’ and black moods in his songs.
Me and the Black Dog explores these issues by depicting the interactions of a female protagonist and a giant black dog. The animation conveys how the unruly, dark element of one’s personality isn’t necessarily something to eradicate, but can be valued as an intrinsic part of oneself. Me and the Black Dog aims to challenge how mental illness is perceived, thereby lessening the shame that surrounds it.
In the film, the spoken text avoids a narrative structure - sentences collapse into repetition, rhyme and plays on words. The visuals are aesthetically similar to the 1970’s Roobarb and Custard cartoons, with crudely drawn, nebulous outlines emphasising uncertainty. Drawing inspiration from the old English saying, ‘A whistling woman and a crowing hen, bring the devil out of his den’, a tune whistled by a woman appears in the soundtrack.
Me and the Black Dog has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
28 Day Flower Diary
I began my 28 Day Flower Diary when I was at home looking after toddlers and a mother with early-onset dementia. The term housewife with its connotations of floral tablecloths & coffee mornings didn’t seem to describe my reality. Dealing with two children throwing tantrums and a mother in the wilder stages of Alzheimer’s brought confrontation, aggression and disintegration.
I wanted to create a piece of work, which on first impression seemed to illustrate the housewife stereotype, but on a closer reading revealed something of my reality. I wanted the work to help me connect with my past self.
Flower arranging seemed to be the perfect vehicle for this idea. Flowers are often seen as safe, pretty and friendly. They can also be wild, thorny and unpredictable. 17th Century flower paintings are viewed as great works of art by the Dutch masters. In the Victorian era, flower arranging like other women’s endeavours, was seen as a safe occupation to tame idle hands and minds. I wanted my flower arrangements to be less safe – more twisted – to reveal a less tame mind. I chose to create a diary combining bouquets of flowers and texts.
The work is a combination of 28 consecutive diary extracts, 28 bouquets of flowers arranged in Photoshop, and the titles and symbolic meanings of the flowers in each bouquet. The diary extracts, written several years ago, show a person constantly shifting and changing. The flowers and their meanings sometimes contradict and sometimes reinforce the texts – expressing feelings and character traits not immediately clear. The 28 images reflect the days of the menstrual cycle. The work is a multi-layered self-portrait, which reveals a complex and chaotic nature.
28 Day Flower Diary was exhibited at Flowers East, London, and Diemar & Noble, London and featured in the Sunday Times Magazine, other magazine and won a Rhubarb award.
About
Kate Owens is a writer/photographer/artist. After desperately wishing her life become interesting at the age of fifteen, all turned to chaos. Her writing, photography and art has since been churned out in an attempt to restore some order, ultimately resulting in a series of books, The Echo Trilogy, which she self-published in 2024.
Kate studied Film and Photography at the University of Wales, Newport and completed her Masters in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths University. Her work encompasses photography, animation, drawing and writing, and broadly explores mental health. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in the US and the UK, including FACT, Liverpool and Flowers East, London.
Inspired by one of her projects, Kate set up as a flower grower and florist in 2014 and owns and runs Verdley Flowers in West Sussex.