Artlink is pleased to present the solo exhibition Second Daughters: The Commodification of Girlhood by Kate Gibson.

This solo exhibition by Kate Gibson is a series of textiles and paintings presenting spaces of safety and reprieve for young women from a world that commodifies girlhood at the expense of girls.  The people presented have been lifted from contemporary photography, television and social media.  Using textile techniques that historically relied on women’s free to low cost labor, ranging from lace creation in 16th century Venetian convents to textile production in the mills of Gibson’s New England childhood, Gibson creates works of cloth and paint in vibrant hues and joyful patterns that belie her chronic angst for young women. The fabricated landscapes serve as a visual extension of Gibson’s research into how young women have secured modicums of safety and financial gain in a world that requires their participation while denying complete economic access.

Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, September 7th from 5-8 pm!

Second Daughters: The Commodification of Girlhood

I’ve created my most recent work by incorporating three different media—textile techniques, painting, and collage. I comb contemporary media such as staged photographs, television shows, and teen magazines for images of young females; then I pluck their images from those scenes—scenes of girls gathered on curbs or hanging together on stoops or in public bathrooms or other locations that simply terrify me for them…because I am always terrified for girls and groups of girls in today’s culture. By weaving and lacing and stitching them into wholly fabricated landscapes, I reinsert them into places I’ve worked very hard to make pleasant, comfortable, and safe. All I really know is that I am more at ease by having stitched them in place there.

I follow historical Venetian lace patterns in applying the paint; I then pivot to reassembling the cut-out images by stitching them in keeping with historical New England quilting patterns. In this way, I turn to my own family’s historical experiences and practices for girls, anchoring them into something familiar to me, a perhaps inaccurate stand-in for safety. I am marrying contemporary images of girls and adolescent females with historical-stitching practices…while also permanently insulating them into lovely, soft, colorful, and safe spaces that allow me to finally relax about them. 

I am the mother of an adolescent girl, which is perhaps at the root of all of my current angst. 

I was also once an adolescent girl, which is perhaps at the root of all my current angst. 

The resulting pieces straddle the categories of painting, installation art, and craft. They are the physical manifestations of compressed times and cultures, and, to me, they certainly represent shifts in how we view girls and adolescent females and the tensions with which they now live.

Admittedly, I must now wrestle with the result that as I have tried to save my young subjects, I have permanently preserved their girlhood and adolescence in paint and cloth and comfort.

About the Artist

Kate Gibson (b. 1980 in Newport, Rhode Island) is an artist and educator primarily working in painting who has been trained as a metalsmith. She studied art at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, earning her BA in Sculpture, then moved to Richmond to study metalsmithing at Virginia Commonwealth University. She brings a keen awareness of craft and labor that is influenced by her study of sociology and philosophy and her professional experience as a metalsmith. Her research of late has been focused on the ways that women develop themselves and their art when removed from a male dominated society, be it Venetian cloisters of nuns, sewing circles in colonial New England, or teen girls exploring abandoned spaces. Women’s obscured labor remains an invisible hand guiding the world forward. In her work she illuminates this power while demanding safety and rest for the laborers. Combining fabric manipulation techniques, sewing, painting and collage, she creates spaces of refuge for young women while wrestling with her own complicity in using women as subjects. She completed her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the University of Cincinnati in 2020.