INTRODUCING

Kathryn Armitage

‘Disrupting the Beautiful’

Our lastest series ‘Disrupting the Beautiful’ explores fashion not as ornament, but as a language of power. Across two works in this series, Kathryn treats clothing as a site where desire, control, rebellion, and identity collide — staged directly on the female body.

Anchored in the visual language of the Dutch Golden Age, the series borrows its compositional authority: dramatic lighting, hierarchical arrangements, and opulent textiles. Yet those historical references are deliberately destabilised. The male-dominated scenes of power are rewritten, placing the female figure at the centre, not as muses or allegories, but as active agents performing themselves into visibility.

Elizabeth Wilson’s ‘Adorned in Dreams’ provides a conceptual framework for the work. Wilson describes fashion as a semiotic system — a visual language through which ideas, beliefs, and desires circulate. It is inherently ambivalent: capable of objectifying the body, particularly the female body, but equally capable of becoming a tool of resistance. This tension sits at the core of Kathryn’s practice.

In ‘Disrupting the Beautiful’, femininity is exaggerated until it becomes confrontational. Collars inflate, cosmetics intensify, garments push beyond seduction into spectacle. The erotic is twisted into something closer to protest. Rather than shrinking, these figures take up space — psychologically, visually, historically.

The surface of the works mirror this tension. Precisely rendered fabrics sit alongside gestural, unstable passages of paint. Representation and performance collide. Fashion becomes architecture, armour, theatre.

Together, the works position beauty as something unstable rather than fixed: a construct to be questioned, stretched, and disrupted. What emerges is not a rejection of beauty, but a refusal of its traditional limits — and a reassertion of agency through dress, paint, and presence.

Adorned in Dreams (2026)

The Light Within (2026)

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