Katie Tomlinson
Katie Tomlinson (b. 1996, Teesside) is an artist, researcher, and Lecturer in Painting, based in London and Manchester. Tomlinson recently completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, supported by the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award (2021/23). In 2018, she graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Manchester School of Art.
Recent solo exhibitions include At Least Buy Me Dinner First, Brooke Benington, London (2022/23) and Fight the Moon, Paradise Works, Manchester (2021/22). Tomlinson has also participated in significant duo and group exhibitions, including Unannounced: The Other Voices of Silence, Lampo Milano, Milan (2023); Buried in Affection, Galerie Supermarkt, Tokyo (2022); Fayre Share Fayre, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2022); Stories, Bankley Gallery, Manchester (2022); A star is just a memory of a star, Brooke Benington, online (2022); RAW, Soho Revue, London (2022); Obstructions, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2021).
Tomlinson’s paintings reflect on the united experiences of women and focus on the intricate dynamics of human connections. Ideas surrounding power structures and vulnerability; nuances of consent, exchange, and desire; heteronormativity and performative femininity; and the politicisation of intimacy recur throughout her practice.
Through the adoption and utilisation of Bertolt Brecht’s Alienation Effect, Tomlinson invites viewers to perceive the familiar as strange, prompting them to become conscious, critical observers of the narratives unfolding throughout her pictorial imagery. Using vivid colour, playful and surreal motifs, absurdity, symbolism, and varying applications of paint, the works are imbued with tension, concealed messages, and fluctuating tempos. Tomlinson’s paintings serve as both an exploration into the medium and the figures in which inhabit the frame. These figures demand further exploration, inviting questions about their identities, actions, motivations, and relationships with one another.
Tomlinson’s paintings overtly reference moments throughout the canon of Western, patriarchal, art history. She reconsiders, reconfigures, and reclaims specific moments from Painting's problematic past. Harbouring this as a tool to enhance, develop, and reinforce her paintings’ contemporary social themes within a post-MeToo era.