KATE BLOOMFIELD | THE WORK
STATEMENT
From a young age Kate Bloomfield has been enamoured by a range of different media artists, from Manet and Baudelaire to Paul Klee. Bloomfield’s understanding of the extensive range of artistic mediums, was furthered during her time in Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, where she studied Fine Art. However, when painting, she found her creative instinct was being channelled and dictated by those who had influenced her intrigue in the art world as a child.
Referring back to the words of Baudelaire and Susan Sontang, she took a leap of faith. Leaving painting behind her, she decided to travel and draw influence from her own surroundings.
She then began to take photographs, gradually gaining confidence in her vision as something of value in itself without needing to be dressed up in theory or concepts. In the mean-time, she spent time working in a variety of settings caring for people, people with enduring mental illness, older people, people with lifelong illnesses. Bloomfield and her lens however, manage to see beyond the naked eyes of passers-by, her photographs capturing something perhaps unexpectedly beautiful. She seeks out the beauty in the small things, the small moments and the spaces between.
‘My sight continues to be informed by the life I lead but the photographs are not of my life, but on the journeys from a to b’
Kate Bloomfield has lived in London all her life, using her camera not to capture the glamorous parts of London not the grim and repulsive bits, but find an oblique beauty in the everyday.
Bloomfield’s work acts as a document of daily struggle and the hope which drives it, finding colour in even the most shaded of city corners. Catching London as it really is and its understated visual as an alternative to the thousands of photographs shown in the media.
‘Often the moment before I take a photograph I see a ‘painting’, I see an arrangement of colour and form, that it in its eloquence communicates something strongly to me that I feel connected to.’
Bloomfield is a photographer who sees through the eyes of a painter. Where the seemingly random blocks of colour in the work of Paul Klee, and the role of a‘flâneur’ taken on by Manet, have been ideologies which carry on to be infiltrated within her work.
CV
EDUCATION
Foundation in Art and Design, Camberwell School of Art and Design
BA degree in Fine Art, Central St Martins
Diploma in Intermediate Photography at London College of Printing
2 Years Private mentoring and assisting internationally renowned photographer David Montgomery.
EXHIBITIONS
‘Street Summer Show’, Postively 4th Street, London 2010
‘Animal House’, Guest Projects at 1 Andrews Road, London 2009
‘Open House’, Brighton, 2008, 2009, 2011.
FORTH COMING EXHIBITIONS
‘Are you being served’, Ledbury McIntyre Basement, London, September 2011
Publications
A Gazeta, 2008
The Times, style section, 2009
PHOTOGRAPHY FOR BANDS
Mystery Jets
The Gin Riots
Oscio