Draft:Katrina Palmer (artist)

Katrina Palmer (born 1967 in Hendon, London) is an English artist based in London. She studied sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal College of Art, London, where she completed her PhD.

Practice. Palmer’s multidisciplinary, text-based practice is known for its investigations of sculptural materiality of what sculpture can be, while exploring our physical and psychological relationships with objects. Palmer works with storytelling, distributing fragmented elements of narrative across found sites, audio environments, printed matter and performance. The site of writing and the process of attempting to materialise, edit and reformulate ideas, often in restricted spaces or situations, is articulated through her work. Attentive to uncertainties, bodily vulnerabilities and insecure environments, these situated narratives invite the audience to consider objects that are indicated, but often not fully present. In this way her narratives take the form of books, while her exhibitions fill buildings with sound, performances and readings, and in both the city and landscape she creates site-specific walks that are guided by audio tracks.1 The work is often simultaneously disconcerting, amusing and claustrophobic.2

Palmer’s often unsettling installations examine the themes of presence, of absence, of openings and the body, and how these are infused with memory and mortality, where absence becomes the object.3 These ideas have engaged with number of evocative subjects including the limestone materiality of Portland Island, the post-Morton objecthood related to London’s Necropolis Railway, and Women and the First World War.4  Recently she has returned to an early theme explored in her doctoral work -  the structural and institutional frameworks of the art school/university, its mediations, parameters, restrictions, and attendant absences. Words or the lack of them, however, remain central to Palmer’s work, as well as the limits or failure of language or that of the language of sculpture, while at the same time drawing out the unsettling qualities of the everyday.5

Career. In 2014 she was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for artists, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award. Her works have been featured in several exhibitions, including Tate Britain and Hayward Gallery in London, plus solo commissions for Artangel based at Portland, the Henry Moore Institute (2015-16), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2018), and Estuary and Waterfronts (2021). In February 2023, her solo exhibition, ‘What’s Already Going On’, was exhibited at Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre. In July 2023 she received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Sussex.6 In November she was invited to be artist in residence 2024 at the National Gallery, London.7

She is the author of The Dark Object (2010), The Fabricators Tale (2014) and End Matter (2015). The Dark Object is now in its third edition, (2023). Her solo work ‘What’s Already Going On’ is accompanied by a new Book Works publication titled Black Slit (February 2023). Palmer is currently guest editor for Book Works of Arrhythmia – a new series of publications selected from open call due for publication in 2023-24.8