Katherine-Jayne Watts

Post graduate student, primarily working with latex to create interactive pieces of materiality. The unknown excites me. The process and the outcome are of equal importance within my practice.

Q&A

Artist Statement

Young, ambitious creative, who studied Fashion and Textiles design at The University of Portsmouth, and graduated in 2019 with First Class Honours. Awards include; London Graduate Fashion Week 2019, winner of the Sports & Leisurewear Award sponsored by Tessuti and shortlisted for the YKK Accessories Award. During my Masters at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, I developed a body of work focusing on skin. Skin is both a barrier and an encounter and this interdisciplinary praxis investigates the interplay between being a body and having a body. It is an exploration of how skin acts as a site of memory, how skin leaves traces with age and acts as a visual record of a remembered past.Skin is the largest organ of the human body, which is often overlooked, and is “conceptualised as something that is worn, the inescapable garment” (Benthien, 1965). I seek to push the boundaries, encapsulate “Body Prison” (Benthien, 1965) and challenge the point of connection all stemming from the almost abject latex human skin materiality. I seek to create an immersive experience for a sensual encounter evoked through participation of trying on materials next to the skin.I have now graduated from my Masters with Distinction, and continue to explore this creative avenue.

What craft do you work with?

I came about this method of making while completing my Masters in Surface Pattern Design at The University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and been working on it for over a year. I was so intrigued with the process and outcome of using liquid latex to create a new material.

What inspires you to work with this craft?

In the last two centuries, the body has been referred to as a model of a house and that “we tend to interpret a building as an analogue to our body, and vice versa” (Pallasmaa, 2012). One of my favourite techniques that I used within this body work was creating moulds. This was a crucial turning point in my practice as I could form my own skin like materiality, with the engraving leaving a trace of the intricate details. With my growing interest with the material latex, I looked into the swiss Avant Garde artist Heidi Bucher (1926-1993) particularly her mouldings and the relationship between architectural space and body.

How do you start your creative process?

“It’s not just coating the structure with latex but the very physical — almost violent — act of peeling itaway, struggling against the material to pull at first small chunks with fingers, and then leveraging the strength and weight of the whole body to skin and unskin the structure itself” (Zeiba, n.d.).The process of my work was extremely repetitive and time consuming, being careful not to apply toomuch force and being constantly on edge, hoping it comes off in one piece. The feeling of relief if itwent well or the disappointment of spending hours peeling to end up with crumbled pieces of latex was intense.Each skinning is unique, like our fingerprints which was my favourite part of the outcome. Everyone has skin that is different, and even one mould creates a set of different skins which is almost generational, family of skinning’s from the same mould. Reflecting on this, according to Kafka, “the process of growing old and becoming dirty and wrinkled is a matter of negligence and fault” (Benthien, 2002) and “process of remaining captive in the skin which marks the individual for a lifetime” (Benthien, 2002). This rigid dichotomy between being captive and the letting go, detachment from the past. Pulling the latex off the mould is almost like shedding skin. The skin shedding is part of a natural process that the body has, and this casting off, letting go and new life is I would like my work to represent.