Kate Power

With a microscopic focus on gesture and shifts in energetic intensity, Kate Power’s work aims to attune attention to both conscious processes and unconscious sensations. She seeks to make invisible phenomena — shifts in temperature, tightening in the chest, sound vibrations — strangely perceptible, staging an imagined inner world between sensation and perception. Her practice explores how proximity is inscribed in the body, and how subtle shifts can reveal — or exert — quiet forms of power, felt before they are named.

Through sculpture, text, and performance, she plays out strange intimacies between the social, artificial, and organic, treating non-sense as a form of language and community-building. Central to her work is the idea of translation — and its refusal —creating spaces where meaning remains slippery, and empathy with the unfamiliar is encouraged.

Grounded in somatic research, queer theory, and archival inquiry, Power’s research project Absolute threshold explores how listening draws us towards states of critical reflection, slowness, shared attunement, and understanding or care. Articulating “hearing differently” as a question of diverse sensing, her project will attend to the vibrational and relational textures of experience that are often silenced or overlooked. During her residency, Power explores listening as an embodied, relational, and political practice — one that moves beyond the ear to consider the whole body as a site of sensory, emotional, and environmental perception.

Biography

Currently based in Glasgow, Kate Power is an artist and writer from Tarntanya (Adelaide) in Australia. Kate completed a BA in Fine Art at the South Australian School of Art in 2014 and an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2023. She has presented work at David Dale Gallery (Glasgow), Art Gallery of South Australia, Outerspace (Brisbane, QLD), Vitalstatistix (Adelaide, SA), Gallery Sejul (Seoul, KOR), West Space (Melbourne, VIC), NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NYC), Ace Open (Adelaide, SA), Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, among others. She has undertaken residencies at The British School at Rome, NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, and SIM in Reykjavik, Iceland. Kate was a 2020 recipient of the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Art Scholarship.

 

Recent exhibitions

2025	Molecule of interest, solo exhibition, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, SCT
2023	Alas, Florence Street Gallery, Glasgow, SCT Short Lapses, Salt Space Gallery, Glasgow, SCT
2021	Mucosa (with Kate Bohunnis), Outerspace Gallery, Meeanjin, Brisbane, AU Bedroom, installation and performance, Vitalstatistix, Tarntanya, Adelaide, AU