Kate Daw: Love, Work (Show Me Grace)

Kate Daw: Love, Work (Show Me Grace), the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, explores the complex relationships we have with the world of ‘work’ and the spaces in which we engage in labour and creativity.

Central to the exhibition is Daw’s role as an artist and teacher. Much of the work revolves around the ways women work and talk together; the trust involved in working with a teenager she has been teaching to draw over the past year (the ‘Grace’ of the show’s title), as well as the conversations that Daw has shared with young female art students about their relationship to the art world and their own artistic ambitions.

Love, Work (Show Me Grace) sees Daw revisit her interest in language, reproduction, design, patterning and motif. The exhibition comprises new paintings and a series of typewritten text works, together with a suite of silkscreen prints, a series of paintings on found slate boards and an ambitious installation in the gallery’s hallway. In conceiving this new body of work, Daw has drawn on the experience and imagery of her many visits to India; the process of observational drawing; the strength and resilience of sisters, as well as paying homage to key artistic, literary and personal influences. Daw’s practice continues to explore issues of authorship, narrative and creative process: moving between the spheres of domesticity and the workplace, the everyday and the imagined.

Love, Work (Show Me Grace) continues to negotiate these subjective and emotional registers – engaging the artist’s own personal history within a context of broader cultural and social experiences.