Pattern | Kate McCalmont-Woods

There’s something very satisfying about drawing a line.

Paul Klee loved a line. Taking a line for a walk.

Bewölkung (Clouds), Paul Klee, 1926

I stand in front of this Paul Klee every time I go to the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. Ink lines drawn over watercolour evoke feelings and moods, suggesting, not defining.

I listened to a film whilst I did this. I like the suggestion of form created by the pattern of the lines. It’s made me think about something underneath trying to get out. The real me? I find these sculptures to be disturbing but compelling at the same time.

Maybe the lines are the contours of my life on a map. My own satnav so I know where I’ve been and where I’m going. Lots to think about.

I’m starting to feel excited about a trip I’ve booked to Vienna in December. I’m planning to binge on Schiele and Klimt, as well as Sachertorte (if I can find one that is definitely nut free)!

I love Klimt, in particular the way in which his figures disappear into, or emerge out of, his highly patterned and decorative backgrounds.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907

I’ve only recently discovered a Berlin collage artist, Kathrin Kuhn, who produced a series called Housewives.

” The Housewives project began as an experiment. In the Natural Science Museum I started thinking about animals tricks to make themselves invisible, a camouflage strategy called somatolysis. Butterflies for example use confusing patterns to melt into their environment to disappear from enemies eyes.

I started to apply that effect to my images, melting peoples clothes with the wallpaper patterns, mixing them up in the most bewildering way. I called the project Housewives because I found it a good metaphor for the way women were living in the past decades as housewives; being one with their homes, being connected with their domestic tasks so closely that it becomes an identity, even having a decorative function. The women in the pictures could use their patterns to disappear in their established setting, or leave it, to stand out in the most striking way in another environment.”