"There’s nothing quite so perfect as potatoes 

there’s nothing quite so perfect as potatoes 

there’s nothing quite so perfect as potatoes

potatoes, perfect potatoes, potatoes, potatoes."

 

Characters based on the people closest to her populate Kate Groobey’s paintings and videos. She observes the strategies and mechanisms friends and family employ to cope with their own bodies, careers, relationships, and mortality. Through the creation of her work she embodies these characters, trying on their personas and presenting stylized versions of their survival mechanisms. The lyrics presented above come from one such strategy, a song written by Groobey’s father and niece.

​

Although the paintings are based on the artist’s experience of others, Groobey herself is always present in the work, not only through the emotive brushwork but the traces of her footprints.

​

The presence of the artist is taken further in Groobey’s video work as she literally becomes the painted characters, bringing them to life with dance and movement. For these short films the artist has created costumes and backdrops that are based faithfully on her paintings. The abbreviated soundtracks come from a collaboration with the Paris-based DJ Jackson and his Computer Band.

Erica Redling, Redling Fine Art, 2016