Miss Kat
CREATE TO TAKE YOUR PLACE
COURSE
How did you become an artist? When did you start out busking?
I started painting in the street when I was a student in the Fine Arts department at Jean-Jaurès University, then called Toulouse-le-Mirail. I was already interested in graphic expression on walls, my initial experiments focusing on the materials themselves. Artists like Antoni Tàpies and Barceló were my first inspirations, as well as the Ndebele tribe, women who create murals depicting pure forms with primary colors in South Africa. I learned about the city by taking series of photos of wall fragments, from simple graffiti to stencils and a collection of the 3615 posters that invaded abandoned spaces in the 1990s. That's how I discovered the beginnings of graffiti in Toulouse, while wandering through vacant lots not far from Arnaud-Bernard.
Seeing all those painted walls made me want to do the same, starting by copying the texture of the wall onto a stretched canvas. I recreated graffiti, pasted fragments of posters onto my canvas. It was on the Mirail University campus that I painted on a wall for the first time, in 1992, with Karine. Mosquito, a friend of mine who was one of the very first graffiti artists in Toulouse, was also there. With Karine, we painted a female figure along an entire length of a wall that was easily ten meters long, then a mural called Alec Eiffel, a tribute to a song by the rock band the Pixies. It was a spontaneous act, the first of many. We were supported by a waiter from a café who stayed open very late for us. I then met Vanessa: "Miss Van" was also studying at the university's art department. She had started painting with graffiti artists in squats. While chatting with Vanessa, I mentioned my interest in walls, and we came up with the idea of doing a mural together. That's how it all began. This was the famous Kat & Van period, which lasted from 1993 to 1995: we had very little, just blue, white, and red paint. All the characters we painted over a year and a half were sky blue and pink, which is why we got noticed. Vanessa then went on her own. Meanwhile, I met Fabienne, "Fafi," to whom I taught the basics of mural painting. During those early days, everything related to urban art was also linked to friendship, because it was connected to the spirit of graffiti. At the same time, I began to want to create my own world individually. My artistic work at that time was very experimental. This multitude of deployed graphic ideas still allows me today to revisit elements sketched in the 90s to explore them further.
You have often painted in pairs; how do you perceive working in a group?
It was about sharing a similar and unique graphic interest, and this mainly happened between 1993 and 2000 with Miss Van, Karine, Plume, Lus, and Fafi. I still paint in groups when the opportunity arises, often with other graffiti artists, because I've always enjoyed sharing. These can lead to wonderful, one-off graphic experiences.
In parallel, you continued exploring different mediums.
I consider myself first and foremost a visual artist, so I continued my artistic explorations. I co-directed a short film with Catherine Aïra in which I play my own characters. I then incorporated my female figures into posters for fictional films. My screen prints and stickers are also hand-drawn and then processed using digital or traditional tools. While I use spray paint for large walls, I much prefer acrylics for the quality of the color and the flat washes they allow, and I love spray guns for creating large gradients. I also enjoy working with graphite and India ink. As for my street art interventions, I first paint my characters on paper because I can no longer spend three hours in the street like I used to. Finally, I collaborated on exhibitions at the Lieu Commun contemporary art space, where I created costumes for female ghosts and curtains for primitive film sets.
WORKING ON THE IMAGE OF WOMEN
Your female characters have evolved considerably since your early work to their more recent forms. They bear witness to the evolution of your work over time.
I've always worked extensively with line and graphic design in general, and that's how the image of femininity is conveyed in the street, influenced by my graffiti practice. I then wanted to clarify my approach, whereas initially I was considering several things at once, moving from a feminine pictogram to a masculine or animal one, hoping to create a dreamlike space within the urban environment to attract attention by playfully combining the graphic elements I drew in my sketchbook. I quickly focused on women and girls and still reflect today on the interplay of proportions and lines, without neglecting the importance of color.
You gradually developed and drew pin-up girls
I did indeed question the images of women conveyed in society. I grew up watching puppet shows like Les Guignols, Les Nuls, and The Simpsons on Canal+; every day I saw a pin-up girl twirling around to indicate the day. I also saw walls plastered with 3615 Ulla posters advertising the Minitel Rose (a French online sex service). So it seemed quite logical to offer a personal graphic response to the image of women by creating pin-ups in the street, initially inspired by Marilyn Monroe and Betty Page. There was a quest for freedom involved, because, in my opinion, art should be in the street. Creating these deliberately stereotypical images, whether sexy or simply charming, colorful or not, allowed me to assert myself as a woman. Today, I think there's still value in painting pin-ups as an artist in urban spaces. They have evolved over time and now have a hybrid appearance, somewhere between woman and cat. A series entitled "Crying Woman" (echoing a work by Picasso who greatly enjoyed seeing Dora Maar cry) is currently being created. The meaning is now fully apparent.
Pin-ups, for example, are exaggerated and fetishized figures.
These figures are highly fetishized, with proportions devoid of any realism. Following this idea, my female characters could resemble monsters, if we refer to the definition of the word which comes from describing a physical peculiarity and is also close to the verb "to show".
Has the message conveyed by your characters evolved between the 90s and today?
It's not the same discourse anymore, partly because the world has changed. Social media has amplified stereotypical images of women, and new clichés have emerged through the absence of gender. What I find striking is that my characters are increasingly resembling the desires of some young women on platforms like Instagram: to have a perfect body at all costs, to reshape it to the point of making it almost monstrous. Otherwise, my female characters still talk about the same thing. They take their place in the city, just like the Baby-Dolls I've revisited in recent months. It's still an issue that I think remains very relevant.
How did your different series intersect?
Each series raises its own unique questions. For example, the "Crying Woman" series is linked to the desire to see more and more female artists recognized in the public sphere. The Baby-Dolls series, on the other hand, is connected to a graphic style I greatly appreciated in the 90s and which still seems essential in this brutal and chaotic world. The imaginary film posters originated from an artistic project on a short film from 2003: it took so long to complete that I gradually began to imagine fake posters. My series are therefore interconnected, as I don't abandon any of them once I start working on them.
AN ARTIST IN URBAN SPACE
In what ways is the street a unique space for creation? Has your perspective evolved over time, given that you started there at a very young age?
The street is a unique creative space because it speaks to a wide audience. This, in my opinion, raises the question of art for all, but also that of freedom of expression. On this point, my perspective hasn't changed at all; I've always wanted to be close to people, with a pretext for meeting them. This is also why I teach, finding that sharing my knowledge with middle and high school students complements my work as an artist.
My perspective on the illicit aspect has partly evolved. It has shifted from a gratuitous act, a free expression highlighting the idea of creating a dreamlike space within an urban setting, to projects linked to artistic directions. However, I return to this "initial state" whenever possible, as it is the very essence of my creation and what I enjoy most.
Would you say that it was necessary to assert oneself as a woman in the street through painting?
I would not use the word assert oneself, instead to take his place. It's important to take a place that many women didn't necessarily imagine. Very few women painted in the street before the 1990s. In France, Miss.tic was already present as a street artist; she had started a few years earlier. Being in the street meant having a place in the city, but also a place in society. The images I wanted to work with were those I had originally seen on posters, in books, or on television. The wall was the perfect medium for what I wanted to do with them, with their strong graphic elements and colors. I chose to paint in the street for this reason, but also for the fun of it!
THE STREET, A SHARED CREATIVE SPACE
What is your relationship to the ephemeral? Is it an integral part of the street game?
Before 2008, all my paintings were spontaneous; the ephemeral was an integral part of my creative process. This allowed me to constantly re-examine my questions, and for a woman, it forced me to assert the place I wanted to occupy in the urban space. Without explicitly mentioning feminism, I felt there was value in inscribing these stories and images in the street, to complement the predominantly masculine architecture already present in the city. The ephemeral is ultimately a beautiful thing, a creative leitmotif. Being touched by someone or covered over by municipal cleaning gives me the energy to keep going!
You started in the world of Graffiti, did you ever feel a gentle shift towards Street art?
I come from the world of graffiti because I started painting in the same places as them, alongside Miss Van, and sometimes even with them. In that sense, I belong to the post-graffiti movement. However, I've never felt like I was doing street art. Some urban journalists seem to think that doing collage automatically means being associated with it… I find that reductive, because for me, some graffiti artists do more street art than graffiti… Ultimately, it all depends on how each person defines it. As a fine arts student, I was aware from the start of what I was producing and why I needed to paint in the street.
What matters to me is the city and the interaction of my images with the public. From the mid-90s, graffiti became quite popular in Toulouse thanks to the characters painted by women, being present everywhere in the streets, and not as wild as in Paris, where the graffiti artists of the capital echoed rather harsh stories in squats marked by beatings and fights. Street art is a term that encompasses many artistic expressions and evokes a stereotype of what street art is. Journalists who don't want to delve deeper can say that I'm a street artist, just like Invader, who is often referred to as such. To answer your question, I consider myself more of a visual artist.
Can we still use the term "movement"?
The movement marked the beginning of my artistic collaboration with Miss Van; that's how we referred to it. Graffiti was, and still is, perceived as a movement in itself. Post-graffiti is another movement I belong to; it refers to artists who were initially inspired by graffiti.
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