KATE BREAKEY

Hand-Colored Archival Pigment prints (with pastel and pencil)

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Golden Stardust

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Las Sombras

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Work by Kate Breakey ranges from $525- $5800 +

Books

Golden Stardust is a series of photographs with gold leaf on glass. A contemporary version of the Orotone, Breakey's image is digitally printed on Ultraviolet Art glass with 24kt gold leaf applied to the back. These editions are comprised of 20 unique various. The works are usually in a found or vintage frame so each work in the edition has a different frame. Breakey's works are compelling both hung alone and in groupings installed salon-style.

Las Sombras is a series of photograms on paper in editions variable of 10 placed in found or vintage frames. Her collection of photograms, entitled 'Las Sombras / The shadows' was published by University of Texas Press in October 2012. It comprises many hundreds of images from a bald eagle to tiny moths and flies. This series is a continuation of her lifetime investigation of the natural world which in her own words is 'brimming with fantastic mysterious beautiful things'. This work was show in a group exhibition called 'Grasslands' at the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona 2013.

Kate Breakey's Las Sombras/The Shadows are contact prints known as photograms or photogenic drawings. In these prints she has covered the photographic paper with a layer of translucent golden paint to tone them sepia, these works have a similar look of Victorian illustrations yet their sensibility is distinctly modern. Making pictures without a camera, like early nineteenth-century photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, Breakey also shares their affinity for recording the natural world in scientific detail as well as with artistic beauty. These shadows are full of light. Breakey's luminous images of coyotes and whipsnakes, hopping mice and scorpions, are filled with her love of the American Southwest, where she lives, and the animals, plants, and insects that inhabit the land. In the way she poses the animals, Breakey's coyotes and rabbits dance; her birds fly. 

This is an art that entails both the primitive and something ethereal. In her text for her book Las Sombras/The Shadows the photographer says that she burns these "shadows" of animals and plants onto photographic paper "with light and with love." 

At the heart of Breakey's art is a scientist's curiosity about the natural world, joined with an artist's passion for its heartbreak and beauty. These pictures of dead animals and flora are presented with no artifice beyond the monochromatic backgrounds. If it weren't for the visceral subject matter, the appearance would be almost austere, in some ways relating to Imogen Cunningham's and Edward Weston's 1920s plant and shell photographs, which were considered to have a radically simplistic focus. 

Breakey has written that she makes a photogram of a deceased animal "so that its beauty and its death are memorialized." Her new book, Las Sombras/The Shadows, features 99 plates that represent a veritable almanac of the American Southwest— included are images of a bobcat, a bush cucumber, an armadillo, a prickly pear cactus, a desert cottontail rabbit, an Arizona walnut leaf, and a Gila woodpecker. Emphasizing their link to the past, Breakey writes the scientific Latin names of the animal—Canis latraus for coyote, Sylvilagus audobonii for the desert cottontail—in a silvery antique script on the paper, and frames them in vintage or thrift-store frames. 

Also on view in this exhibition are the artist's Orotones, her Golden Stardust series. Unlike the photograms, these works are photographs digitally printed onto UV museum art glass upon which the artist burnishes a layer of 24K goldleaf. Photographs taken from many areas around the world where the artist has travelled, from Scotland to Australia to Italy and beyond, the artist's keen eye finds magic in every landscape and every object she encounters. 

 Since 1980, her work has appeared in more than ninety, one-person exhibitions and more than fifty group exhibitions in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, China, New Zealand, and France. A native of South Australia who has also lived and worked in Texas, Ms. Breakey now resides and photographs in the desert outside Tucson. The major archive of Breakey's work—traditional photographs as well as photograms—is held by the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, San Marcos. Las Sombras/The Shadows is the third Breakey book in the Wittliff's Southwestern & Mexican Photography series. 

Her books include Birds/Flowers published in 2002 by Eastland Books and Slowlight published by Etherton Gallery in 2012. Breakey has produced three substantial monographs in collaboration with The Wittliff Collections and the University of Texas Press, beginning with Small Deaths (2001), followed by Painted Light (2010) a career retrospective that encompasses a quarter century of prolific image making, and Las Sombras/The Shadows (2012) which is comprised of many hundreds of images, from a bald eagle to tiny moths and flies. This series is a continuation of her lifetime investigation of the natural world which in her own words is "brimming with fantastic mysterious beautiful things." "My art," she says, "is about connection to all living things on Earth." 

Kate Breakey's Statement:

The Element 'Gold, (Au) can only be made in the nuclear reactor of stars. It came to our planet when the Earth was first forming, as dust from catastrophic astronomical events —stars imploding and ejecting energy, as light and matter. The events that produce most of the gold in the universe are called 'Gamma Ray Bursts'. This occurs when a double star consisting of two neutron stars collapses under the force of gravity. Neutron stars are the cores of dead stars. They are only a few miles in diameter; so dense that every last bit of matter has been compressed down to the density of the atomic nucleus. The two dead, dark stars spin around each other for millions of years at millions of miles per hour, constantly pulling each other closer. Then finally they touch. At that moment more energy is released than the rest of the universe combined. Much of their mass collapses into a black hole and leaves our universe forever, but the rest is released in an enormous explosion of gamma rays and newly-formed elements. Some of that star-dust flung into space is gold. The gold in the Earth's crust was carried here on asteroids that hit the earth, during the 'Late Heavy Bombardment' 3.8 billion years ago when the Earth gained most of its mass. The Ancient Egyptians believed that gold was the flesh of their Sun god 'Ra'. I was struck by the beauty and brightness, the depth of Orotones, which were first made in the early 20th century by, among others, Pillsbury and Edward Curtis. My work is a contemporary version of an Orotone. The image a digitally printed on UV Art glass with 24kt gold leaf applied to the back.

Kate Breakey is internationally known for her large-scale, richly hand-colored photographs including her acclaimed series of luminous portraits of birds, flowers and animals in an ongoing series called Small Deaths, published in 2001 by University of Texas Press with a foreword by noted art critic, A. D. Coleman. 

Since 1980 her work has appeared in more than 90 one-person exhibitions and in over 50 group exhibitions in The United States, France, Japan, Australia, China, and New Zealand. Her work is held in many public institutions including the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, the Austin Museum of Art, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra and the Osaka Museum in Osaka, Japan. Her third book, Painted Light, published by the University of Texas in 2010, is a career retrospective that encompasses a quarter century of prolific image making. 

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. In 1999, she moved to Tucson, Arizona. In 2004 she received the Photographer of the Year award from the Houston Center for Photography. She now regularly teaches at the Santa Fe Photographic workshops

Her collection of photograms, entitled 'Las Sombras / The shadows' was published by University of Texas Press in October 2012. It comprises many hundreds of images from a bald eagle to tiny moths and flies. This series is a continuation of her lifetime investigation of the natural world which in her own words is 'brimming with fantastic mysterious beautiful things'. This work was show in a group exhibition called 'Grasslands' at the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona 2013

Her landscape images - selected from a life-time of photographing all over the world - were published in a Catalogue, 'Slow Light'. They continue to be shown most recently in an exhibition called 'Heartland' at the Art gallery (Museum) of South Australia. 

Her lastest landscape work 'Out of Darkness' was showcased in an Exhibition with Keith Carter entitled 'Within and Without'. Her landscapes become a metaphor for dramatic personal events that have recently changed her life.