Katie Hector

How do you paint others? For Katie Hector, this is both a practical and an ethical question. Even though she makes paintings, she rarely uses paint. Instead, she sprays dye and bleach onto canvas with an airbrush gun. The results are intimate, glowing portraits that quietly reflect on love and loss. The larger-than-life faces are painted as if the artist knows them well. And sometimes she does – often painting photos of friends and family. But she also draws people that she doesn’t know, working from images on the internet and social media. This throws up important but difficult questions for Hector. "Images are tricky, dangerous things", she says.

During the pandemic, Hector spent much of her time in the studio pondering these questions. But behind her talent for capturing the complexity of human emotion, is a technical, problem-solving approach. When she first started using dye, her colour palette was limited to red, yellow and blue. But she worked towards including more acidic greens and blues which brought a whole new environmental angle to the work. “When I look at the painting I’m thinking about toxic people, or apocalyptic people in the future, living in an atmosphere that’s heavily polluted and radioactive and glowing a little”.