Pictures of loss and perseverance
Kate Jacob had to put her art career on hold when tragedy struck. As she celebrates her first solo exhibition in years, the Sheffield painter tells John Blow how love and loss inform her work.
OF all the paintings Sheffield artist Kate Jacob has created over the years, it is usually the one she has worked on last which she favours the most. “Because they are really intimate pieces,” she says. “It’s a strange thing, but I think some of the process of making the work is a bit like falling in love.”
That sounds like it could drag up some pretty intense emotions for an artist who typically has around 40 canvases on the go at one time.
A passion for the project right in front of her is understandable, though, given her life’s work has been one punctuated by long pauses, affected by the loss of loved ones – her late husband and, more recently, her mother.
That perseverance only makes her first solo exhibition in 20 years all the more special.
How To Knit A Nebula is on now at the Mura Ma independent gallery, which celebrates rising artists with interesting stories, in the Marple area of Stockport. Jacob’s latest body of abstract works explore grief, loss and memory, and are displayed after a time in which she supported her mother, Emily, through dementia.
Ahead of the exhibition, she was excited but daunted. “What you do is so personal, it's quite easy to hide in a group exhibition. And then obviously, in a solo show, there's no hiding,” says Jacob, 57, of Nether Edge.
However, she does not lack for experience. Jacob was brought up in London but attracted to “this mythical north,” she says, and after studying textiles at Manchester Metropolitan University, relocated to Sheffield. It was where she met her husband, Dave, and where she has stayed for 27 years.
The Sheffield art scene back then was “very quiet,” she adds, but “if the opportunity is not there, then you make it, and I think artists are really good at doing that and they're very entrepreneurial and it's not something people really think of, often, with artists, but I think they do it all the time.”
One example is Jacob’s co-founding of Open Up Sheffield more than two decades ago. The annual event allows people to visit working South Yorkshire studios, talk to the