www.katiehancock.co.uk
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Artist Manifesto: I consider myself to be a keeper of feminine biographies, and an explorer of the unseen, time, and labour of women. I pause to look over the ambiguous appropriation of heathen ritual into organized religions and class-system and as someone given a label of belonging to a belief as a child, I ponder at the validity of its claims, its hypocrisy, power, wealth, and
relevance. I feel the need to settle the score for myself and those that came before, I attempt to right some wrongs. I see the ridiculous within societal expectations, and its labels, I embrace subjects by seeking the truth and depth of their journey, each one is a beautiful sculpt. I am deeply indebted to nature and connected to the healing properties of green and blue
spaces, I believe that our schema is intrinsically linked to our experience of these, and I imagine the way in which women would interact with their surroundings, and navigate expectation; how might past women have been forsaken by family, spouses, their workplace, organized religion, and how can my art cast a light on these wrongs. The Anthropocene impacts me deeply, humans are a nest of sharp things slowly imploding, themes of Solastalgia and sustainability fuse in my artwork, expressed in a furious rush of creation.
Bal Maiden: Contextual Statement The concept is seeded in the embodiment and manifestation of a Bal Maiden, the narrative
of a working-class woman who played a crucial role in the mining industry and is a symbol of suffrage with a lowly wage and status. I spoke to her through her factual history and envisioned her worn complexion, purpose and demeanour and communed with her in the mining landscape of Geevor, whereby the oxides from mining waste build a deep and rural palette of pigments representative of west Cornwall. This blurred, smeared figure of this working woman, painted, daubed, in my mind’s eye, her gait, the calloused, hard feet from wooden clogs, the ruddy rough hands and muscular, perhaps wiry stature. She wears the extravagant work dress of a woman attending the mine surface to crush rocks with hammers, whilst the young girls were set to work sorting the ore for processing. Geevor adjoins Botallack and the North Levant Mine on coastline altered & sculpted by its mining heritage; streams of scaly bright green water infused with copper carbonate zig zag down the face of burnt red iron granite boulders and into the sea creating a dramatic coastal backdrop, peppered with the footings of long-gone mining buildings. The Bal Maiden and ‘i’ walked this coastline through soupy sea fog and whipping windy squalls, she curled her arm through mine squeezing tight, heads together as we leant into the gales and gusts as the gull’s zip across the coast. It is easy to romanticize the industrial revolution when we walk the incredible Cornish coast; for the Bal Maiden, although no longer restricted to her household chores, the patriarchal restrictions were maintained through illiteracy and unequal pay, indeed women were considered to be unlucky so were not employed underground in the Cornish tin mines. This work churns over thinking upon how much has truly changed as I desperately seek self-care through my art practice. The Bal Maiden’s landscape is the narrative and her avatar the symbol of this ecofeminist focus. Through autoethnographic writing and the passage of self care we have travelled the coast to create this body of work, culminating in a body of writing, painting, a zine, reading walks and a site specific exhibition at Botallack in March 2025.
