Open Frequency

Open Frequency is a curated online programme presenting new developments in contemporary art. Selected artists are nominated by key curators, writers and artists from across the UK. Recently profiled Scotland-based artists include Katy Dove, Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, Camilla Low, Toby Paterson and Hayley Tompkins.

Open Frequency is a programme area of Axis, the arts council funded leading online resource for the contemporary art community.

Katie Orton

Edinburgh based Katie Orton is an artist interested in the concept of the microcosm. What can a seemingly insignificant product or action tell us about societal forces and methods of control?

What is it that makes us who we are? That is the question at the heart of Orton's work. She seems to have a fascination with the props of identity; a ring on a finger, what drink is ordered at the bar, ornaments on a mantelpiece, what brand of cigarette is chosen like a badge to be worn.

Orton herself has quoted Oscar Wilde, 'The cigarette is the perfect type of pleasure. It is exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one ask?' A witticism, which contains the essential proposition of the aesthetic movement - that life is to be lived intensely.

This ethic is not only evident in the subject matter of Orton's mythology, but also in the immediacy, speed, and brusque rigour of their creation. Her prolific and sometimes wrecking-ball method of making she credits to the teachings of Picasso - 'I don't know if what I'm doing's any good, but I'm doing it, I'm doing hundreds of it,' and seems to be a motto echoed by her many named influences including Bob Dylan, Jean Cocteau and Talking Heads.

Orton is fascinated with lit human consciousness as designated by fire. The Prometheus myth, for example, imbues her work. Whilst in Christian symbolism fire exists as a servant and symbol of God and it is the eating of the apple which symbolises man's 'fall' into consciousness, in the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus the Titan gives man fire and so releases (or condemns) him to self-consciousness.

Orton's preoccupation with this 'fall' is examined through her own falls and how she might avoid them in the future: cigarettes, organised religion, self-help groups, consumerism.

Fetishism is an essential element of Orton's practice: the hands of Christ, the Cigarette, the Chaise Longue, Alcohol. It should also be noted that all are symbols of sacrifice. Christ sacrificed Himself on the cross for the sins of mankind; the smoker/drinker sacrifices himself using his sin as the means of doing so, whilst the chaise-longue has seen the sacrifice of many an artist's model and analyst's subject to their omnipotent interpretation.

The ultimate sacrifice, death, underlies Orton's practice giving it an urgency and humour - in order to keep hell at bay, the last vestiges of her lapsed Catholicism.

For Katie Orton the big questions seem to remain relevant, even if they are to be found in the specific. To return to the original point, Orton's work has a Blakean sense of the universal found in a tear drop. Whether the tear is one of self-pity, empathy, humour, delirium, sadness or just for dramatic effect depends on the societal forces and levels of control you have been subject to or the moral choices you make.
Amended version of John Millar's essay for New Work Scotland Programme 2006.

Perhaps this is an example of the liberal state quietly transmogrifying into a less tolerant society. Prohibition is presented in stark terms: 'turn or burn'. Hands holding lit cigarettes also sport stigmata wounds from which blood pours copiously.

A dice game is stacked in God's favour – a determinist world view that doesn't quite gel with laissez faire leisure and bohemian frission. This injunction against smoking, and its current demonisation, deliberately jars with the more glamorous depiction of smoking in Orton's works wherein the weed is social ritual incarnate, a means of occupying wiry narcoleptic hands. The rapid psychoactive effects of tobacco smoke are conflated by leisurely images of time-wasting games such as solitaire and pool.

Biography Katie Orton studied BA and MFA Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art (2000-2005) and the Stuttgart Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Germany. She is a Director of The Embassy, Edinburgh and a founder of ZUG fanzine, and her work is in the collection of Charles Saatchi and private collectors in Scotland, London, Berlin and Rhode Island USA. Orton will be exhibiting at the Project Room, Glasgow in March 2008. She lives and works in Edinburgh.