Artist Talk with Kate Breakey

Join us as Tucson icon Kate Breakey brings us into her creative world – sharing her personal and professional history and revealing the concepts and processes she employs in her ongoing series Las Sombras – currently on view in the Tohono Chul exhibition Prescience Remains.

“The images are Sepia toned silver gelatin photograms – part of a larger series of photograms of plants and animals made over a ten-year period. They range from the tiniest of creatures — scorpions, beetles, bats, and mice, to larger mammals, coyote, javelina and deer – several hundred individual plants and creatures in all. Their imprint, a ghostly shadow, burned directly onto paper with light to make a permanent record. Never has it felt more imperative to make documents about diversity as we watch species disappearing at an alarming rate.

We now know without a doubt, trees can communicate – silently share information using an underground network of fungal ‘mycelia’. It is a fanciful notion, but seen together, the botanical photograms seem to me like a kind of calligraphy, all the beautiful shapes, characters of an indecipherable plant language.”

Since 1980, Breakey’s work has appeared in more than 110 one-person exhibitions and in over 60 group exhibitions. A native of South Australia, Kate moved to Austin, Texas in 1988. She completed a Master of Fine Art degree at the University of Texas in 1991 where she also taught photography in the Department of Art and Art History until 1997. Her work is in the collections of: the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; The Center of Creative Photography, The Australian National Gallery, and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, as well as various private collections. Kate’s work is represented by Etherton Gallery, Tucson, AZ.