Engaging stories told in the art-cum-archeology of Kate Morrell's work

Kate Morrell is part artist, part archeologist with her concern for artefacts and appropriated histories. Her latest, a book entitled Alpine Spoilers, is a selective amalgamation of the final words of mountaineering memoirs held in The Armitt Library (who commissioned the work), deftly drawing “the aesthetic canons of romanticism and the real possible outcomes of pain and death” into a weighted finale.

Other sculptural works continue Kate’s impressive handling of research and reference material, in turn utilising a process or a knowledge base to form objects imbued with a conceptual history of Kate’s interpretation. This is evident in her work with knapped flint, fashioning of stone axes (exhibited at the end of her time at the Royal College of Art) and accomplished books that compile the studies into neat designs of engagingly typographic-like images.