ABOUT THE ARTIST & HER WORK
Katha is a British emerging photographic artist now based predominantly on the North Norfolk Coast of England but also, part of each month in London. She recently moved back from living in Andalucia in Spain where her inspiration for her inaugural collection THE BIGGER PICTURE COLLECTION came from.
She is a photographic artist and she works with private clients coaching them to help them to understand how to work better with their brains and achieve happier and more successful lives. Qualified as a Solution Focussed Hypnotherapist and working to help people definitely comes through in her artistic work. She creates hypnotic, enlightening, relaxing and therapeutic artistic work with great depth and extraordinary and unusual qualities.
Katha has a deep passion for the countryside and the natural world, animals and especially horses. She understands only too well the importance for all of us to relax, get away from our work and stressful lives to allow ourselves to relax our thinking to help us to process our emotions more efficiently and she is delighted to create this transformative effect through her art pieces.
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The Bigger Picture Collection is Katha’s inaugural collection. It is a collection of work which she produced from 2020 to 2022. The years that Katha spent most of her time living in Andalucia in Southern Spain. This body of work brings together reflective, meaningful pieces, some of which reflect the challenging period that we all experienced between 2020 and 2022.
Through trial and error, Katha arrived at choosing to print all of her work in this collection on brushed aluminium. An extraordinary medium which brings attracts light and brings depth to the presentation of her photography. The medium produces nearly a 3D quality. The pieces seem almost to come alive, changing in character all day long, depending on how the light in the the space that they are hanging is behaving. Any white or very light areas of the original image files have been removed, and in their place the metal shines through, creating extraordinary light reflecting depth to her work. Sometimes the pieces have an almost silk like quality, other times they catch your eye as light reflects off the lighter areas of the piece, bringing them to life and to your attention. Her work is striking, exceptionally creative and very unusual.
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Words from Katha...
During the unusual times that we all faced in 2020 and 2021 and since, I, like many, struggled! There were moments during that time, feeling cut-off and isolated, particularly from my family, not being able to engage in normal life, feeling heavily controlled in every direction, which were unbearable for me, as for many.
I escaped to my camera and found myself developing my joy of capturing my surroundings, the landscape and natural life and wildlife. I started to develop my creativity with my images in the digital darkroom. Creating something slightly other worldly started to give me a lot of pleasure. It transported me, provided huge relief, escapism perhaps. It lifted my spirits. Capturing nature, the sky, the clouds, the long horizon, birds soaring freely above me. Adapting these images to create something a little surreal gave me joy, relief and now my passion for my art continues. I found the medium of brushed aluminium. I wanted to print on something more 3 dimensional than just paper. I do print on Hahnemühle textured fine art paper at times too, which I also love, but I discovered brushed aluminium and this gave me real joy. The light reflecting qualities giving me the most joy! We print directly onto the brushed aluminium and the white areas in my images are removed, leaving bare metal and the sheen of the metal underneath to shine through. These pictures shine in all sorts of different lights. They come alive at different times of the day and night, depending on where the light source is coming from at that time. Different parts of the pictures come alive and go to sleep and feel depending on the ambient light and this brings character and life into your space.
I hope my photographic art will resonate with you and inspire you. I hope you too will experience the joy, relief and inspiration that it gives to me.
My mission is to bring as much of my uplifting, light reflecting art to as many people in the world as possible, to bring that light into your lives too.
WHAT IS PHOTOGRAPHIC ART?
In photographic art, the artist uses the camera as the tool to create the work of art. The camera is used to make an art piece that reveals the vision of the artist and makes a statement of that vision, rather than documenting the subject before the lens.
Katha is a creative photographic artist, a mother of 3 daughters, a dedicated horsewoman, lover of nature, the countryside, natural water and animals. She is also a solution focussed hypnotherapist, working with people all around the world to support and guide them in achieving their goals and objectives in life.
From the beginning, her mission with her photography has been to capture what catches her eye with her camera, digitally enhance it to create stunning photographic art to share with her clients and collectors so they can enjoy these gems within their own spaces to bring light and enlightenment into their every day lives.
MY PROCESS
I generally capture my images using either my Sony or Hasselblad cameras. I adapt and edit the images in the 'digital darkroom' and when I am happy with the image, it sings to me! I then move into the sampling stage. I sample the artwork on a small square of brushed aluminium, working with the laboratory that prints my images. Until I am happy with the printed result, I keep correcting the image in the digital darkroom and resampling it.
I am currently printing most of my work on brushed aluminium. It has been a long iterative process getting to the point of choosing to print on this medium. I was looking for something with more depth than paper. I wanted to find a medium that would respond well to light - I found something that attracts light - that could be hung without the use of glass in front of it, to get away from problems with reflections, and which would give my work real depth.
One of the beauties of working with this medium, is that the whites and brights in the digital file are removed, enabling all of those areas of the image to expose the metal it is printed on. This creates extraordinary light reflecting elements in and across the piece. Furthermore, the texture of the brushed aluminium has a direction of travel, and this means that - depending on where you are standing in relation to the piece of art - or where the light is coming from at that particular time of day, in a natural light setting, the picture displays different qualities to the observer. The piece almost comes alive: changing throughout the day and into the evening and in relation to your position to it. This brings a unique and characterful piece of art into your life.
My brushed aluminium pictures are printed and produced in one of the most advanced printing laboratories in the world. The aluminium is presented as a dibond (a sturdy composite material consisting of two aluminium panels and a black polyethylene core). This three-layer material is just 3 mm thick and low in weight. The print is cured with ultraviolet light, protecting it from light damage, dust particles, and moisture. My artwork is printed directly onto the surface of the metal, using UV Fine Art pigments.
Katha Wood, July 2023, London