Kate Hipkiss

Kate uses a scalpel to cut paper by hand, creating 3-dimensional forms that explore paper as a normally ‘unseen’ material. She alters documents and books as a way of considering our understanding of paper’s role in communicating information and to facilitate an exploration of individual and collective memory.

Her work with paper maps, in which she removes all but the barest information, explores our sense of place and the way in which we interpret information on the page, while in a series of altered books she creates 3-dimensional forms from the pages and cuts redacted poetry from the words. The words lead the viewer around and through the form, creating new stories from the original text and addressing the rules of the page, language and her own practice.

More recent work with the handwritten word—meticulously cutting old letters from paper—not only examines her personal family history but also our move away from handwriting as an engaged form of communication towards a more immediate, transitory, digital communication. Married with the central tenet of her practice—paper—this raises questions of longevity, significance, materiality and impermanence.

In 2023 Kate’s altered atlas ‘Breathe’ was awarded 3rd prize in the Viviane Fontaine International Paper Triennial in Switzerland. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including the RA Summer Exhibition, Wells Art Contemporary and the Paper Fibre Art Biennial in Taiwan and in the UK.

Kate graduated in Visual Arts: Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts in 2003. In 2020 she completed an MFA with Distinction at Oxford Brookes University and is currently researching for a Fine Art PhD by Practice.