Artist Statement

Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2013. 

Kate Mitchell’s Lucky Break is a seven-sided heptagram shape, each side is a different coloured screen and together they make up the colours of the rainbow. Here Mitchell breaks through each of these coloured sheets – her videos are always shot in one take with the artist herself undertaking these often dangerous actions. There is a humourous, slapstick quality to many of her works which is really enjoyable. [source: Kathleen Linn, https://www.artshub.com.au]
For Sydney-based artist Kate Mitchell, the idea of art as work and the artist as both manager and worker is important. Her videos document the artist working tirelessly to achieve seemingly reckless and unattainable tasks. While there is a comic quality in her work, the actions make us think about the limits of what is acceptable and normal.

• Kate Mitchell, born 1982, Australia. Her practice spans video, objects, image-making, and public interventions. Mitchell’s video works often position her as the central protagonist in absurd, challenging, and amusing situations – teasing out themes related to productivity, labour, success, and failure. The current focus of her practice draws on social uses of magical thinking and New Age practices and their collision and absorption by contemporary society. Mitchell is interested in the multi-layered outcomes of these experiments that speak to who we are, what we value and how we exist. https://www.katemitchellartist.com