Bio:
Kate Flake (Decatur, GA 1991) is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in artist books and prints. They have a BFA in Printmaking from the University of Georgia and a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Fine Art from Brandeis University. Kate is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2026). In addition to their practice, they have interned with the Atlanta Printmakers Studio in Atlanta GA, and worked as a Fob Holder and Education Coordinator with Second State Press in Philadelphia, PA. Kate is influenced by their time spent working as an educator in Ehime, Japan, and growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta, GA. Stephanie Van Riet is one of their main collaborators.
Statement:
I am fascinated by systems and always searching for patterns or connections. As a child, I enjoyed ordering things and spent hours rearranging collections of rocks, stickers, and shells to find pleasing patterns and shapes. As I placed each fragment, the connections between them became evident, and an overwhelming mass of information became a system with rules I could understand. Play taught me to cope with my anxiety and feel a small measure of control in a chaotic world that my neurodivergence made challenging to comprehend.
My practice is rooted in how I played as a child. I amass vast amounts of printed ephemera and paper, fragment them, and arrange them as pages of books, sculptures, or prints. Currently, I am interested in memory and how it decays. Alfred Korzybski theorized that representations of things are not the actual things themselves. Similarly, our memories are not experiences. They are impressions that we rewrite as we age. Our minds are inefficient archives that we use to construct our identities. My current project uses found images from my parents’ family photo albums. I have very distinct memories of the home I grew up in in Lithonia, Georgia, but my memories lack detail. The photos help the details surface and uncover objects and people I have entirely forgotten. I am still rearranging materials to create a balanced whole, but the materials are my memories and the balanced whole is a simulacrum of my mind.