Katie Sollohub is primarily interested in documenting and recording the places she lives and works in. She has carried out numerous residencies including JMW Turner’s house in Twickenham and Strawberry Hill House. Her work explores the narrative element surrounding objects and their quotidian, physical presence in both interiors and gardens.
Her interest in interiors began as a way to make her relax in new surroundings. She found by drawing these spaces she was able to enter into and hold her new environment. Latterly this has led to an interest in the traces people leave, the way they inhabit spaces and the overlaying of memory and history on the present.
The garden paintings have emerged from a slower pace of working, painting as a meditative thought process, rather than the more pressurised pieces produced in other people’s spaces during her residencies. ‘They include more of a sense of narrative, playing a role beyond mere observation’. Renaissance paintings by Piero della Francesca have informed her choices for composition, space and colour.
Some of these paintings were created during one of Katie’s ‘Roaming Residencies’ undertaken at the Moncrieff-Bray Gallery in the Summer of 2020. When invited to someone’s space Katie spends time drawing, observing, walking. She documents these first impressions in charcoal, the way she interprets the space, the way she feels it, the way she inhabits it. She describes this process as ‘taking a line for a walk with my feet, with my body, with my mind.’
Katie studied social anthropology at the University of Sussex and Fine Art at Northbrook College. Shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize, last year she won the Derwent Drawing Prize for her drawing of the Blue Bedchamber at her residency at Strawberry Hill House. She has exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show, the Discerning Eye and the Lynne Painter Stainers Prize, and held solo shows in prestigious venues including Orleans House, Richmond; The City Art Gallery, Winchester and the Light Box, Woking.
The garden paintings have emerged from a slower pace of working, painting as a meditative thought process, rather than the more pressurised pieces produced in other people’s spaces during her residencies. ‘They include more of a sense of narrative, playing a role beyond mere observation’. Renaissance paintings by Piero della Francesca have informed her choices for composition, space and colour.
Some of these paintings were created during one of Katie’s ‘Roaming Residencies’ undertaken at the Moncrieff-Bray Gallery in the Summer of 2020. When invited to someone’s space Katie spends time drawing, observing, walking. She documents these first impressions in charcoal, the way she interprets the space, the way she feels it, the way she inhabits it. She describes this process as ‘taking a line for a walk with my feet, with my body, with my mind.’
Katie studied social anthropology at the University of Sussex and Fine Art at Northbrook College. Shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize, last year she won the Derwent Drawing Prize for her drawing of the Blue Bedchamber at her residency at Strawberry Hill House. She has exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show, the Discerning Eye and the Lynne Painter Stainers Prize, and held solo shows in prestigious venues including Orleans House, Richmond; The City Art Gallery, Winchester and the Light Box, Woking.
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