K A T E T E D M A N
E N G L A N D
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Kate Tedman, born in Whitehaven, England in 1979, began her art career as part of an international art collaboration called ‘Kate Eric,’ alongside US artist Eric Siemens. Tedman and Siemens collaborated for 11 years after launching their successful career at London’s Albemarle Gallery in Mayfair. From London they headed to San Francisco where they began working closely with Bay Area gallerist and curator Wendi Norris of Gallery Wendi Norris. They soon began splitting their time between San Francisco, US and Genoa, Italy, producing paintings and sculptural works displayed in the USA, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Tedman, formally Kate Eric, has been reviewed and featured in ARTnews, Art in America, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times and other publications. Kate Eric exhibited in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States, culminating in a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2012. Their artwork is also included in numerous public and private collections including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Kate Tedman exhibits paintings and embroideries that chart connections between diverse motifs, signs and symbols. Anamorphic forms combine with graphic iterations of birds and animals, and passages of representational painting. Sharing the unifying space of the picture plane, links are formed between culturally disparate figurations. We experience a magic-carpet reverie of notional connections and correspondences.
This is an inventory of exoticism that brings to mind the inquisitive and acquisitive Orientalism of the nineteenth-century European explorer, immersing themselves in ‘the other’.
The artist makes quasi-maps of the iconography of colonial exchange, stitching connections across time and space to form a cultural amalgam and, what she describes as, “a system for survival.”
Tim Wright