Characterising a period of profound personal and artistic change, hybridity and transformation have been central themes in my work for nearly 20 years.
Exquisitely made and distinctively coloured, my ceramic sculptures, paintings and drawings embody these themes, which I explore through storytelling and materiality, from a biographical perspective and within the context of kinship with multispecies.
My work builds a posthuman world of hybrid beings that blend human and nonhuman traits and appear caught at a moment of change, as if emerging into being or coming to life. Grouped in ensembles, they personify a shifting, chimerical quality between one thing and another.
In my process, I channel clay’s inherent resistance and malleability, also feminist-Surrealist semi-automatic techniques, and apparitional tendencies like pareidolia - seeing faces-in-things.
Personal memories and experiences feed my work, fortified with a wealth of other research - from psychology, art history and early animation, to ancient sculpture, European folklore and bone-chilling fiction. Julia Kristeva and Isabelle Stengers’ writings have enhanced my ideas about blurring boundaries and reclaiming knowledge based in animism and imagination.
My uncanny characters exude humour, laced with an undercurrent of lurking disquiet: they stir uncertainty about what or whom they might be, playfully subverting what you think you see.
Biography
UK-based artist Kim L Pace* works across media with a focus on drawing and ceramic sculpture. She studied Fine Art at Exeter College of Art, Birmingham Institute Art & Design and Städelschule, Frankfurt.
Kim has been awarded four artist fellowships including the Evelyn Williams Drawing Fellowship, the Linbury Drawing Fellowship and Berwick Gymnasium Art Fellowship; she has also received seven Arts Council England awards.
With over 25 solo & duo shows and numerous group exhibitions, internationally, her solo institutional exhibitions include: Limerick City Art Gallery, Ireland; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; Northern Territory Gallery for Contemporary Art, Australia; Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield; McLean County Art Center, USA and Berwick Gymnasium Art Gallery, UK.
Supplementary to her art practice, Kim has been invited to curate projects like ‘Cult Fiction’ for Hayward Gallery Touring, London, ‘Labyrinth of Darkness’ at the Czech Centre, NYC and ‘From Doodle to Digit’ at Tate Britain.
Selected artist presentations include the Courtauld Institute, the Henry Moore Institute, the Sainsbury Centre Norwich, Somerset House, London and the International Society for Folk Narrative Research. She is an elected member of ISFNR.
Her published writing includes ‘Making New Stories about Multispecies Kinship through Vital Material Encounters with Clay’ (Synthesis International Journal of Comparative Literature, 2023) and her work is featured in recent publications including ‘The Inking Woman’ (2018); ‘The Drawer’ (2019); ‘31 Women Artists: The lasting Legacy of Surrealism’ (2020); ‘The Medium of Leonora Carrington’ (2022) and ‘Animation and International Surrealism’ (forthcoming 2025).
Kim’s most recent solo exhibitions include Danielle Arnaud, London, 2018, 2019 (duo), Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, 2022 and Arusha Gallery, forthcoming 2024.
Hear Kim talk about her work in conversation with Bob Chaundy on the Considering Art Podcast. (*Previously known as Kim Merrington)