Kate Gottgens

Fever Dream, 2026

Central to Gottgens’ practice is the collecting of found everyday photographs. Gottgens then selects and recontextualises figures and elements in environments, pulling from multiple photographs to produce a new narrative on canvas. This borrowing and dislocating from the original – often suburban – scenes defies nostalgia, enabling a looser story disconnected from an identifiable time and place, with space for critique of a collective memory. Here the beautiful exists alongside the ominous, domestic encounters with sinister underbellies.

The body of work including ‘Fever Dream’ finds its conceptual foundation in the work of writer and painter William Blake who did not distinguish between the living and the spiritual; author Madeline Miller, known for her reinterpretations of Greek mythology from the perspective of female protagonists; and novelist and short story writer Angela Carter’s collection of gothic, feminist reimagingings of fairy tales, with female protagonists embracing their rage, ferity and desire. Gottgens takes these references and constructs her own femme fatale and all-encompassing, liminal figures that are both real and spectral, givers and takers of life able to create their own worlds.