Community, curiosity and collaboration are at the heart of award-winning Katie Anderson’s work. Dumfries & Galloway Life’s 2023 Visual Artist of the Year tells Carol Hogarth about her career, which covers everything from sound and light installations to sign writing, sculpture and public engagement; why she loves learning from others, and why she is always on the look-out for interesting conversations.
At just 33, Katie Anderson has “crammed a lot in” to the past 11 years, carving out a multi-faceted career as a public artist in Dumfries & Galloway and beyond.
From sound and light installations to sign writing, sculpture and public engagement, her work is impossible to pigeon hole, spanning a wide range of creative disciplines and frequently breaking new ground.
However, it does all have something vital in common: “I see public art as work that’s being made for a public space, or work that’s being made with the public,” she explains.
Enrolling on an introductory course in art and design at Carlisle College, after leaving Annan Academy at 17, Katie chose to study fine art out of curiosity.
“I didn’t really know what it was. Fine art encouraged me to be explorative and use creative processes to interpret the world. That fired me quite a lot,” she says.
Katie then took a year out to explore whether art really was what she wanted to do. She did some travelling before returning home to be Cornet’s Lass at Annan Riding of the Marches and enrolling on a fine art degree course back in Carlisle.
“It was a broad course where we were encouraged to ‘follow the concept’. I spent a lot of time in the sculpture department and learned casting, using bronze, ceramics and resins. It was about object making and I built up a technical skills set so I felt more confident in making.”
After graduating, Katie successfully applied for a 12-month, Holywood Trust-funded residency at Wasps Studios in Kirkcudbright. “It was such an amazing opportunity. I hadn’t really been aware of the creative network in Dumfries & Galloway before that and it let me meet everyone.”
That included The Stove artists’ network in Dumfries: “It was the early days of The Stove. There was such a great energy. They were using creative processes to explore possibilities.”
Katie became increasingly involved and helped out on The Stove artists’ Ferry Bell Tower project in Creetown, giving her an early taste of community engagement in public art.
“I was a lot younger than everyone else, but they made space for young people to come in. It’s always been amazing in Dumfries & Galloway to work with and learn from older, established artists. That doesn’t necessarily happen in other places.”
Working on more group projects and winning “tiny, micro commissions”, Katie decided to explore the possibility of being a full-time artist: “I thought I’d give it a go for a year or two. I was seeing other artists who were doing it somehow and they were supportive of that being an option for me.
“I was living with my parents and just had enough to run my car. It was a while before it felt less like just scraping by.”
Katie worked on projects with Wigtown Book Festival and Environmental Art Festival Scotland as well as The Stove at this time and attracted small pieces of funding to produce her own work.
These projects included Sound Horn, a sound and sculpture installation providing an immersive experience which explores the effect of a created soundscape on our experience of place.
It was the start of Katie’s interest in working with sound: “Sound changes how we react to an environment or object,” she says. “It’s a really interesting additional way to think about place. A familiar landscape can become totally different by adding a soundscape.”
Sound Horn formed part of Sanctuary Lab in Galloway Forest Park in September 2017 and has gone on to feature in various venues around the UK since. “It still gets commissioned about once a year. I like pieces that have a lifespan like that.”
Katie also explores how our visual landscape can be changed by public art through her signwriting work. “A key thing at The Stove was our visual identity in the townscape of Dumfries and how we didn’t fit in with it. We started to play with the building as a big canvas and found a regular group who were keen on the lettering side of things.”
From this grew the Dumfries Women’s Signwriting Squad, which meets monthly and does community-based and commercial signwriting work.
“I’m interested in the visual language and how, with hand painting, we can gradually change the visual environment. People are seeing the value in hand painting. It’s having a national revival.”
The Squad has worked for other artists, small businesses and Dumfries Museum. Community is at the centre of Katie’s work, most of which, she says, is about finding ways to engage people, often those who might not usually be involved with the creative world.
Barrow Tarot, which came out of an artist residency with the Art Gene team in Barrow-in-Furness, is a perfect example. Through conversations with local people, Katie designed a playful tool, based on traditional tarot cards, for exploring possible futures for the community, taking inspiration from Barrovian identity and everyday finds.
Another Barrow project – Voices of the Future – involved secondary school pupils being encouraged to express ideas and opinions about their area through creative workshops and share their work with Barrow Town Council and the town mayor.
One of Katie’s major priorities for 2024 is Remembering Together, a collaborative commission for Dumfries & Galloway Council, DG Unlimited and greenspace scotland with fellow artist Dr ts Beall, creating memorials to honour the people lost to Covid, mark what was lost and changed by the pandemic and “preserve the best of what we learned and created together” at that time.
Extensive public engagement has led to the development of a Dispersed Memorial Forest plan involving the planting of 400 trees across five sites, in Castle Douglas, Dumfries, Moffat, Sanquhar and Stranraer. Sculptural memorial markers will also be incorporated and related community events are planned.
Katie says: “It’s a big, emotional challenge. Some people are still very upset and angry and the views and feelings about the pandemic have changed dramatically. We’ve had feedback suggesting that people are glad to have been heard.”
Collaboration is nothing new to Katie, who has always thrived on working with other creative people. “I enjoy what I can learn from others. There’s more richness in the work when you bring another vision into it. I’m a result of the very good collaborative ethos we have in D&G.”
Although she has enjoyed working on projects around the north of England and the Scottish central belt, Katie – who was named Visual Artist of the Year 2023 at the Dumfries & Galloway Life Awards in November - remains firmly rooted in the region: “I love the creative community here. Most young artists aim to leave where they’re from to go and work somewhere bigger. I’ve never wanted to do that because there’s such a great network here.”
While demand for her work continues to grow and her working life becomes increasingly busy, Katie is not one to rest on her laurels: “There are no closed doors,” she says. “I’m always on the look-out for interesting conversations.”
