(click image for more details)Study 7 (Farrow & Bollocks), 2007
Farrow and Ball household paint on canvas
120cm x 120cm
Study 6, 2007
44cm x 63cm
Study 1, 2007
42cm x 59cm
Katie Orton's drawings and sculptures take their inspiration from popular culture and bar society. Solipsistic figures populate smoky bars, drinking, playing pool, seemingly caught in some hedonistic purgatory between getting on with life and filling the space left before we die. Yet it is in just such spaces where a liberation from expectation occurs, where we can take on different roles and big ideas are formed – a space where giving one's self over to reverie can turn into something more universal and profound.
The shadow of death hangs over many of Orton's characters, self-obsessed and occupied with their own pleasure. Along side this urgency there is also a self-evident humour – a laughing in the face of doom. Her work belongs to the tradition
of the booze-soaked sing-along and rantings of the bar-room bard, sentimental yet ultimately defiant in the face of all that life throws at us.
'...Orton's work has a Blakean sense of the universal found in a tear drop. Whether the tear is one of self-pity, empathy, humour, delirium, sadness or just for dramatic effect depends on the societal forces and levels of control you have been subject to or the moral choices you make.'1
Paul Stone, 2008
1. Neil Mulholland, Open Frequency, Axis, 2007
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