Garner Kate in Curlers

In *Garner Kate in Curlers*, Kate delivers a sly, contemporary portrait that transforms a familiar domestic ritual into a charged image of self-fashioning. With a precise, controlled handling of line and surface, the artist heightens the tension between candid intimacy and constructed persona, allowing the sitter’s curlers to read as both everyday apparatus and sculptural crown.

Kate’s approach situates the work within a lineage of modern figurative art and feminist portraiture, where private space becomes a site of cultural production. The composition’s poised immediacy invites close looking, rewarding viewers with nuanced tonal shifts and psychologically alert detail.

At once tender and incisive, the work speaks to beauty labour, performance, and the politics of visibility.

Kate Garner was expelled from high school at the age of 16 and became a runaway who joined The Children Of God. To escape the grasp of the cult she hitchhiked from London through Eastern Europe to India in 1970, where she lived for a year as a traveller before being located by her parents. She attended art school at Blackpool in the North of England and later moved to London, where she began to both photograph and model for up-and-coming magazines such as The Face and i-D.

KATE GARNER AND HAYSI FANTAYZEE

Kate Garner first came widely into the public eye as one-third of the 1980s avant-garde,…