After completing a BA in Photography at Falmouth University in 2003, Kate Halsall began her career in the film industry. Initially working in art departments on various feature films, she moved on to creating storyboards and painting commissions for TV, film and advertisements, including portrait paintings in oil for the film The Kings Speech.
In 2009 Kate graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London with a PGCE in Art & Design and has worked as an art and design tutor since then, alongside practising as a fine art painter.
Inspired by her love of wild swimming, Kate’s current body of work plunges us into the beauty of unspoiled waters, which hold notions of purification, renewal and liberation, and celebrates the transformative effect of our connection with the natural world on our psychological well-being and emotional health.
Kate observes the world around her cinematographically, capturing moments in time like carefully composed film stills. Her swimming figures are portrayed in rippling water mid-stroke, in scenes heavy with narrative possibility.
In her work, Kate explores a variety of mark-making and combines realistic and semi-abstract styles. Whether she is painting figures, surface reflections or landscapes, her approach is always expressive, which results in highly atmospheric oil paintings.
Kate’s work has been selected for various exhibitions and art fairs, including London Art Fair in 2019, the group shows Places, Spaces, Faces at New Art Projects and Sweet 16 at Jaguar Shoes Collective, both in London in 2018, and the solo show Sleeping Portraits at New Art Projects in 2017. Gala Fine Art was delighted to show Kate’s paintings for the first time at London Art Fair at the Business Design Centre in Islington in January 2024, where they were very popular.
