Open Frequency 2007: Katie Orton selected by Neil Mulholland

Open Frequency 2007: Katie Orton selected by Neil Mulholland Katie Orton, Study 1, 2007

Neil Mulholland profiles the work of Katie Orton


Katie Orton's work bridges the luxury gap between squalor and opulence. She has an uncanny ability to bodge convincing illusions together from cardboard, lino, embossed wallpaper and plastics, making cheap disposable provisions gleam with art deco sophistication.

'God Hates Fags' is the kind of public relations announcement we might see more often if recent bans on cigarette smoking in public places were promoted by the extremist Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. Perhaps this is an example of the liberal state quietly transmogrifying into a less tolerant society. Prohibition is presented in stark terms: 'turn or burn'. Hands holding lit cigarettes also sport stigmata wounds from which blood pours copiously. A dice game is stacked in God's favour – a determinist world view that doesn't quite gel with laissez faire leisure and bohemian frission. This injunction against smoking, and its current demonisation, deliberately jars with the more glamorous depiction of smoking in Orton's works wherein the weed is social ritual incarnate, a means of occupying wiry narcoleptic hands. The rapid psychoactive effects of tobacco smoke are conflated by leisurely images of time-wasting games such as solitaire and pool. Devoid of smoke, these are spaces that are now phantasmagorical; the sinews of smoke and carefully cultivated desuetude stubbed out once and forever.

All that remains of such smoky contributions to a rounded psychic landscape is Orton's imaginative glamour chase, her psycho dramatisation in paintings and sculpture. There is a faux-archaeological character to this search. For the Foyer, an urn constructed from Fablon, looks every inch the image of classical refinement. On closer inspection it turns out to be a giant ashtray compete with cigarette butt, reminding us that such vessels were mainly used for revelry. The fin-de-siecle refinement and opaque melancholia of historical libertarians and aesthetes remains all-pervasive in these works. Their legacy is the precise balance of dirt and desire. As Oscar put it: 'A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?'

Orton's more recent works are engaged with a Bachelardian exploration of worlds of interiors wherein she adopts the role of invisible flâneuse. For Orton, the internalised is intertwined with our relationship with interiors. Internal Affairs – a large solo show at Generator in Dundee, is structured around social divisions that were once dramatised in the upstairs downstairs of large country houses. These social spaces are recounted with a gentle but penetrating humour. Made during a residency at Hospitalfield House in Scotland, works show the imaginary life of the house. Upstairs they play billiards, sip Martinis, tease on terraces and puff perfumes – downstairs they clean. Some painted sculptures sit in the liminal zone between these worlds. A wine carrier that doubles as a gothic church, a pampered woman transforms into a hairdryer, a pair of adidas stripped legs double as a hobby horse. In collage and sculptures, spectres emerge from the embossed wallpaper. The phantoms are playful, they narrate a heterogeneity of lived experiences through contortions of the body.

Neil Mulholland, December 2007


Artist's biography

Katie Orton studied BA and MFA Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art (2000-2005) and the Stuttgart Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Germany. She is a Director of The Embassy, Edinburgh and a founder of ZUG fanzine, and her work is in the collection of Charles Saatchi and private collectors in Scotland, London, Berlin and Rhode Island USA.

Selected exhibitions include Wierding and the Uncanny, a group show at Glasgow School of Art curated by Host, 2007; Internal Affairs, a solo show at Generator Projects, Dundee, 2007; Young Athenians, the first Athens Biennale, Athens, 2007; Menagerie, Edinburgh College of Art, 2007; Young Athenians, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 2006; New Work Scotland (NWSP), The Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2006. Orton was nominated for Beck's Futures in 2006 (by Neil Mulholland) and exhibited with The Embassy at Zoo Art Fair in 2005.

Orton will be exhibiting at the Project Room, Glasgow in March 2008. She lives and works in Edinburgh.


About Neil Mulholland

Dr Neil Mulholland read History of Art and English Literature at the University of Glasgow (MA 1995, PhD 1998). He is currently Director of the Centre for Visual & Cultural Studies at Edinburgh College of Art and a Reader. He supervises doctoral students, teaches on the MFA and leads the MA in Contemporary Art Theory and Criticism.

His work focuses on grass-roots parochialism, narratology, magical realism and metafiction in recent art and criticism. The outcome is manifest in art, criticism, fiction, exhibitions, zines and documentaries. He is author of The Cultural Devolution: British Art in the Late Twentieth Century, Ashgate (2003) and has recently contributed to Rampley, Matthew ed. Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concepts, Contexts, University of Edinburgh Press (2005) and Gooding, Mel. (ed.) The Book of Shrigley, Redstone Press (2005).

He writes regularly for Flash Art, Frieze, Untitled, Modern Painters and Art Review among other magazines. Recent exhibition organisation includes Clueless, OneZero, Edinburgh (2006), Strategic Art Getts, The Embassy, Edinburgh (2005); The Garden, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2005), Campbells Soup, GSA/Glasgow International (2005) and We Go Round and Round in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire, Liverpool Biennial/New York (2004).

Currently hes editing on a reader on postwar Scottish Art, writing a book on the cultural logic of ambient and curating an exhibition for the Blackpool Museum of Contemporary Art.


Open Frequency keeps you in touch with new developments in contemporary art practice from across the UK. The artists are selected and profiled by leading curators, artists and writers, presenting the work of artists to watch out for over the coming year. Open Frequency represents a forward-looking glance today of the artists who will be setting the agenda tomorrow.