Saturated Space | Katy Binks

In Saturated Space – her first UK solo show – Katy Binks presents a new collection of one-off, experimental screenprints in the form of a dynamic site specific intervention. Over the past year or so, Katy has been exploring a looser, more intuitive approach to printmaking. This new sense of freedom has invigorated her practice to such an extent that it now has more in common with painting than with edition-led printmaking. 

Saturated Space brings together a series of around fifty large abstract screenprints, which Katy has “pasted on the walls billboard style… I wanted to create an installation that verges on overwhelming; quite in your face, but also with a stripped back graphic sensibility.” The billboard mention hints at a background in graphic arts, with elements such as half-tone textures and hard graphic shapes referencing the visual landscape of commercial printing and outdoor advertising.       

 “The individual prints in the show are all unique, but there’s an aesthetic thread linking them all. I might start with a stripe or a halftone dot image, but I’ll try and keep things different by using paper stencils or monoprint techniques… As the number of prints grew I naturally started to place them together and look for links.” It’s an approach that embraces positive and negative space, placing equal importance on both the printed and unprinted surface. “I’m always building images, using multiples or one-off prints so I can make something even larger. It’s playful, placing things side by side to find a flow and rhythm from one image to the next.” Her approach to colour is also intuitive. “I have a colour palette that I can't escape, but in these works I’ve been actively looking for those high contrast moments that happen when vibrant colours are anchored by strong blacks and dark blues.”

Her new prints also explore her ongoing fascination with the relationship between art and the urban environment. Her natural impulse is to imagine her work on a large-scale, interacting with the sort of Brutalist concrete cityscape that surrounds her studio in Elephant and Castle, south London. “I’m interested in the spaces between print, object, painting and installation, and the way artworks can operate on all these different levels. The space I'm working in (or on) always has an impact on how the finished work looks. It’s always site specific, because I always respond to what already exists around me.” This interest is also reflected in Katy’s decision to cover the walls of ASC Gallery, rather than frame individual prints and arrange them more conventionally. Instead, she’s thinking big, and the results are a joy to behold.