Kim Booker: I Want to Live Twice

I Want to Live Twice is a solo exhibition by British artist Kim Booker. Situated in a former Methodist chapel, the exhibition explores an existential theme fitting for its setting: a fear of death and a desire for more time, signifying a more personal shift in Booker’s practice.

Working in acrylic on large canvases, Booker uses colour, gesture and figure to express the psychology of the female experience. Her paintings often feature poses that are suggestive of differing emotional states, created intuitively through a combination of gestural abstraction and layers of drawn imagery.

This new body of work features naked female figures, that appear in a position of surrender or sacrifice, resembling the crucifix. Booker’s expressive and energetic strokes and scrawls, particularly over the mouths and faces, suggest a silencing or a loss of control to a powerful force, internal or external. The paintings are self-portraits and are for Booker a process of self-reflection about how much to reveal and conceal about herself. A transitionary state both spiritual and psychological is clear, and in their confessional and reflective quality, the paintings bare all in such a way that many might relate to.

What have you read recently that inspires you?

 I’ve been reading the collected lectures, writings and interviews of Phyllida Barlow. She was such an authority on art, a truly great artist and teacher. 

 

You often paint over and scrub out areas or whole paintings. Why?

 Many reasons. Often the paintings are about this feeling of being silent or mute, and about things that are hidden, so my painting process reflects that. It’s part of the process of discovering the painting as I go, too, because nothing is planned when I begin a work. Sometimes the colours might not be working, or the painting has lost direction and needs to reset. Maybe I’ve revealed too much of myself, or done a bad drawing that I don’t want anyone to see. Frustration! Sometimes it’s because the drawing is too accurate and therefore lacks the ambiguity that I’m looking for. 

 

If you were to live again, what is the first thing you would do?

 Get therapy :)

 

What (or who?) would come back as in a second life?

 A man. Or a migratory bird. 

 

If you weren’t an artist what would you be?

 A poet. And a pet-sitter for money. 

 

Dark or light? 

 Dark feelings, light paintings. 

 

Tea of coffee?

 Coffee. 

 

Now or then? 

Now.

 

When is a painting finished? 

 When it feels like it doesn’t belong to me anymore.