About the Artist: Kate McClenaghen
‘Quiet In-betweens’ - Solo Exhibtion at Tache Gallery, Fitzrovia, London, 12 June - 17 July 2025
Exhibtion Overview:
'Quiet In-betweens' features a series of mixed-media paintings on canvas. Each painting takes as it’s starting point an urban space held in a particular moment in time. Kate takes photographs around South East London during her daily commute, of spaces where we rarely stop and look, but constantly move through. Using this moment in time as a starting point she builds up a painting focusing on the gestural, painterly qualities and the interaction of colours and patterns found in these locations, which she has always been drawn to.
The paintings are labelled with timestamps to reflect these fleeting moments in time. These titles do not give away location nor impose any further associations or explanation upon the viewer, allowing the paintings to speak for themselves by simply highlighting the qualities held in that moment.
> View the exhibition here
To purchase or enquire about artworks from the show please contact @info@tachegallery.com or directly through Artsy
Kate McClenaghen is a painter and mixed media artist who grew up in Wrexham, North Wales now based in South East London. She graduated her BA at The Glasgow School of Art in 2023, and her MA in Painting at The Royal College of Art in 2024.
Kate’s work explores form, structure, colour and texture with the intention of reflecting my physical, emotional and psychological experience of a place.
‘I aim to construct penetrable scenes, environments or ‘scapes’, in which to immerse the viewer. I am trying to relate the experience of moving through that space, allowing the formation of their own narratives emerging from my own. The paintings draw upon a mixture of memory and observation to create the feeling of a combined cityscape and memoryscape. The work focuses on the inanimate, derelict, unnoticed and the not yet fully formed within the urban landscape.
While my process in painting parallels this in its action of doing and undoing, making and unmaking exposing the qualities of something coming into being in its accumulation of material, or the evident trace of its removal. The urban landscape forms a physical and psychological space, a space to materialise my relationship with the world around me that I navigate through the action of painting. This has evolved into a real interest in the industrial and architectural elements that make up a cityscape and how I can communicate a feeling of place.’
She uses the ‘found paintings’ she finds on walls and in public spaces in South East London, extracting their layers of pattern, text, textures and gestural qualities to inform her own paintings. Kate is concerned with the idea of the transitional surface, the material and ethnographic traces of where people have been, and how this might find parallels in the changing surface of a painting.
Education
The Royal College of Art, London - MA Painting, 2024
The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow - BA Honors Degree, Painting and Printmaking, 2023
University of East London - PCET PGCE in Further Education, graduating 2025
Awards
The Paul Desty Scholarship Award, Full tuition fee scholarship for The Royal College of Art, 2023
The Glasgow Art Club Award, Membership and exhibition awarded, 2023
Featured Exhibtions
‘New Perspectives’, Green Gallery, Stirlingshire, April 2025
‘Young Welsh Artists’ , MOMA Machynlleth, Machynlleth, November 2024
‘MA Painting Exhibiton’, Royal College of Art, RCA Battersea, July 2024
‘Things that Matter’ - AMP Gallerv, London. Februarv 2024
‘If you are lost, this is where you can be found’ - Safehouse, London, November 2023 - Co-curated and exhibited.
‘Graduate Award Exhibition’ - The Glasgow Art Club, Glasgow, November 2023
‘Relative Colour’ - Green Gallery, Stirlingshire, August 2022
‘GSA Degree Show’ The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, June 2023
‘Phoebus Cartel’ - Salt Space Gallery, Glasgow, February 2023
‘Chromo’ - The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow, February 2023
‘Pipe Dream’ - The Pipe Factory, Glasgow, May 2022
‘Re-emergence’ - The Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow, August 2021
‘Wrexham Open Exhibition’ - Un Deg Un, Wrexham, Wales, October 2018
Price list upon request
Email: kate.mcclenaghen@gmail.com