Katie Hector uses dye and bleach to create cathartic portraits

Deep in the bleach and dye-filled crevices of Katie Hector’s paintings are allegories for longing, intimacy and grief, mainly “in response to isolation and dissociation” during the Covid-19 pandemic, she tells It’s Nice That. The California-based artist has a practice which revolves around layering dye and bleach to create beautiful paintings that almost appear as if they’re photographs on negative film. For Katie, revisiting her nurtured craft of painting during the pandemic proved to be incredibly cathartic. Gone were the tools of acrylic and traditional paints. What laid before Katie instead were an array of unconventional tools that test the limits of the fibres and the “canvas’ ability to retain or let go of pigment”.

It’s a fascinating mode of work, as well as incredibly rewarding. She’s won numerous awards and scholarships for her work, and continues to dazzle with her fascination of the colourful grotesque. For Katie, it’s all about how “the memory of the surface produces the final after image, an impression of personhood, an uncanny portrait".