Kate Fahey

Kate Fahey

I am an artist and researcher interested in forms of knowledge production that intersect with techno-scientific logic, specifically how images and the technologies through which we encounter them mediate the ways we understand the world around us.

Kate Fahey is an artist based between Kilkenny and London working with print, sculpture, moving image and installation.

She received an MA in Fine Art Print at the Royal College of Art, London in 2015 and in 2020 she completed a practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London. Recent exhibitions include Living Balance at The Library Project (2022), blubbing, (solo) at Commonage London, (2021) Woman in the Machine, Visual Carlow (2021) and Gut Feeling, Arti et Amiticiae, Amsterdam (2021). In 2021/22 she was the recipient of the New Contemporaries and SPACE Studios Bursary. She has completed residencies including ZK/U Berlin (2019) and the British School at Rome (2018).

Mouthnotes cave

HD Video / 05:33 min / 2022

An Cloch Labhrais (The Speaking Stone), is a huge glacial erratic made from conglomerate puddingstone rock. Located in Co. Waterford, it is known as a ‘truth’ telling oracle stone. According to legend, the dramatic crack in the stone occurred after a woman perjured herself in its presence – her untruth causing it to split in two. Mouthnotes reclaims the stone’s split, and reimagines it as a mouth from which a multitude of utterances and un/speakable things leak and spill. Through this disorderly form of self-expression, non-conforming vocalisations flow up to her mouth and out through her tongue*. Breaking away from preconfigured expectations and narratives, mouths and voices separate and reunite, unearthing an imagined enunciation**. These plural erratic agencies emerge through a series of audio-visual Mouthnotes.

* Carson, Ann. ‘The Gender of Sound’ in Glass, Irony, and God. New York: New Directions Books, 2005.
** LaBelle, Brandon. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Time Watched

Two channel / 04:55 min / 2022