writing
2017 Stone Lives, Kate Foster and Claire Pençak in Harkness, R. ed. (2017) An Unfinished Compendium of Materials. Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen.
” … [The Dancer’s] exploration of the stairwell, wearing a river stone, held a moment of shared dependence as geological and evolutionary timescales were counter-poised with insect and human biographies…”
2016 Piloting Strategies: Arts and Land Use, Kate Foster and Claire Pençak. Contribution to ecoartscotland.net as blogpost.
“An outline of creative work conducted in parallel to the regional Land Use Strategy pilot in the Scottish Borders […]. Creative practices can contribute ways of relating to place, and offer alternative meanings and insights that escape conventional appraisal. Artists can act as connectors between disparate approaches, and re-enchant what is overlooked. The work […] is marked by a commitment to improvisation and responding to context. Our consistent theme is finding ways for rural-based arts practice to engage with contemporary concerns, regional and international.”
2012 Way / Tree-lines / Aspen. Art installations at Over Phawhope Bothy, published in Earth Lines, issue 3, November 2012
2012 Field drawing and dialogue as a form of making knowledge, Jen Clarke and Kate Foster, Paper in TRACEY / Drawing Knowledge
“…while you’re drawing, time passes and the situation that you’re in changes, as you become more aware of its components. Back to the idea of ‘so- far stories’ – you can choose to do the drawing in such a way that takes account of those threads of change; or you can draw as conventionally happens, in a way as to fix it.”
Antennae / Alternative Ornithologies
1) Editorial by Merle Patchett includes a quote from Kate Foster about recent work on Hummingbirds; Ruffling Feathers:
“This display [of hummingbirds in the Royal Alberta Museum show] I realise is not for us: since we cannot see in ultraviolet, we can never know what it is that his mate can see.”
2) Merle Patchett, Kate Foster, Liz Gomez, and Andrea Roe. Exhibition the Monstrous Geographies of the Plumage Trade. This includes a quote by Kate Foster:
…. “the involvement of the different curators embraces and draws out complex relationships between fashion, collection, craft, science, taxidermy, and art.” …
3) Kate Foster and Hayden Lorimer. Disposition – a hollow-eyed harrier, displaced and out of time.
“…The hen harrier’s story is one of a fate sealed as soon as its name was conferred…”
For the full journal click on Alternative Ornithologies
A case for so-far stories, responding to the question: where is the politics in political ecology?
A response to a call by University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group (archived)
“… Unfinishable as they are, so-far stories may afford possibilities and juxtapositions that escape an aesthetic of despair. Of course the prompt might be anguish or anger, but fury and grief should not overwhelm quieter voices and tender ways of working, in order to acknowledge complexity.”
Download here: Kate Foster Pol Ec 2012
2011 Glasgow Sculpture Studios on art and geography engaging with climate change Kate Foster with contributions by Hayden Lorimer, Merle Patchett, Perdita Phillips
“Biogeographies of a hollow-eyed harrier” Merle Patchett, Kate Foster, and Hayden Lorimer. In: Samuel JJM Alberti (Editor). “The Afterlives of Animals: a Museum Menagerie”, University of Virginia Press.
Artist Interview with Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir and Mark Wilson, Art and Research, vol 4, no 1, Summer
“…Drawing helps me see how animals respond to human-made landscapes and activities. It reminds me of shared situations but also enchants me about otherness. The drawing is for me and other people, but I learn about my impact and intentions by drawing animals in their various settings. How we represent animals affirms the relationship we want to have with them. You immediately start mediating what you see, so I reveal myself to myself. Sifting through the drawings later allows me to unsettle received viewpoints…”
The full interview is on this link: http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v4n1/foster.php
2008 “Repair work: surfacing the geographies of dead animals” in special issue of Museums and Society: ‘Constructing nature behind glass’ by Merle Patchett and Kate Foster July 2008, Vol 6 no 2. Available here Full journal is online at http://www.le.ac.uk/ms/museumsociety.html
“An artist and a geographer asked the same question: what is a zoological specimen and how can it be used? Considerable attention has been paid to the ‘finished’ form and display of taxidermy specimens inside cabinets, behind glass – in other words to their representation. We challenge the priority given to representation by getting under the skin and behind-the-scenes to show how specimens have been entangled ‘in life’ as well as how we have creatively taken part in their ‘afterlives’.”
2007 Poster for “Nature Behind Glass” University of Manchester: Merle Patchett and Kate Foster: The Lively Geographies of Dead Animals (Awarded a prize from the Museums Association.) download the poster “Lively Geographies”
Kate Foster and Hayden Lorimer. Some reflections on art-geography as collaboration. Cultural geographies in practice, Cultural Geographies 2007;14;425
“…Academia is notionally arranged into ‘disciplines’, each with specialist sub- disciplines and defined interest groups who contribute research. The practice of art usually lacks such recognizable organizing principles, at least while it is being made. What drives an artist towards occasional points of resolution depends on a ‘self- discipline’ motivated by an insistent attempt to articulate and describe an experience or way of being in the world…”
Read the full article here.
Presentation in the Scottish Parliament Working in Public, Final Seminar, Presentation to Scottish Parliament
“Animal and human lives are inextricably entwined, as people are realizing in many different ways. We are ‘bodies in the midst of things’ – shaping the material world as well as being shaped by it. BioGeoGraphies is an artist’s project about entangled lives- teasing out geographies of the ways people and objects are bound together, and selecting which connections to draw to others’ attention. It is about our relationships to things – questions of nature that belong in the foreground of cultural and political discussion. Matter matters.”
2006 Blue Antelope- a photo essay: Seeing is Believing/ Velocity, Kate Foster and Hayden Lorimer.
“…how does a culture reflect the animals it eradicates? And, how do we come to believe what we see?”
Magazine publications
2012: Southlight 12 (2012):
CIRCUS CYANEUS (HEN-HARRIER) – in the Dumfries and Galloway Literary Magazine, with a postscript by Hayden Lorimer
Download article here. For a copy of the magazine, please contact vivien@freeola.com
Artist bookworks
Download Crossbills
Download Count Raggi’s Bird (text only)
Download Stuffed Bird Attached
Blogs
Border Lands: sheepscapes, tree-lines
Reflections on environmental contexts and creative responses
www.meansealevel.wordpress.com