KATE GROOBEY
Always Love
Kate Groobey’s latest painting and performance series Always Love reflects on what we can do in personally and politically heart-breaking times, and finds the answer is always love.
Always Love articulates the experience of strong, queer, womanhood at a time of rising homophobia, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Woman-Life-Freedom movement, cancel culture and war. To this Groobey upholds the ideals of equality and solidarity, pitching love as the strongest form of resistance.
Groobey’s work features two main protagonists: herself, as her alter ego the ‘female stallion’, and her wife the writer and poet Jina Khayyer. In Always Love this lexicon of motifs extends to the hand, the rose, and the heart, a trio of symbolic tools intended to support, guide, strengthen, and empower her two heroines.
In Groobey’s oeuvre, the theme of compassionate love, embodied by a set of objects, dates back to a trip to Japan after winning the Daiwa Foundation Prize in 2018. In Kyoto, at the Sanjusangendo temple, Groobey and Khayyer had a memorable encounter with the towering Buddhist goddess of compassion, Senju Kannon, who holds many objects in her 1000 arms to protect the people, like a bell, a mirror, and a moon.
Groobey’s motifs are first developed in ink and watercolour, then poured, spooned, and dripped onto canvases to create visceral, textured, oil paintings. Her painted heroines don't sit quietly on walls though. Channelling a queer, female gaze, they move, speak and act in performances wherein Groobey becomes her own characters, bringing them to life using painted costume, dance, and self- made soundtracks that incorporate Khayyer’s voice, in which Groobey and Khayyer's intimate daily conversations become universal mantras of strength, empowerment, and love.
Each of Groobey’s masked performances is something akin to traditional Japanese Nõ theatre, where actor and audience are encouraged to shift their perspectives to become one with a character in order to practice their skills of empathy, reflecting Groobey’s belief that practicing empathy towards others is essential for a healthy society.
