Kate Sweeney

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Artist Bio

I am interested in how we can expand the ways to think about and describe ideas of who we are beyond the metaphors of blood and DNA.

When my wife and I became mums to our son, I wanted to find a way to make visible the ways lesbians and queer people produce babies and make families.

My work is drawn from inks, charcoals and stains that I make myself out of the stuff I collect from my intimate environment such as plant matter, soil and scrap metal. I try to use these earthy, dirty, fluids to describe the visceral, messy, challenging and transformative processes of becoming a mum.

I use these inks as the starting point for conversations with other ‘beyond-blood’ parents about family and kinship. These conversations are translated into large-scale drawings, short films and poetic texts.

Drawn from the landscape and containing a landscape to draw from, they are subject to the sun and air; they are in a constant state of change; oxidising and fading, they will deepen and sadden with their own salt and iron and with time.

It is becoming (once again) a difficult time to be an LGBT+ family and yet it feels imperative and important to explore ways of making our lives and connections visible, poetic and relevant.

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Selected Work

Name: Reproduction #4

The work explores parenting and family bonds beyond blood or DNA ties. Reproduction 4 is a response to the growing legal and social animosity directed at LGBT+ families and is specifically a response to a speech I heard on the radio from the Prime Minister of Italy, Georgia Meloni’s, banning, demonising and ostracizing LGBT+ families.

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