Kate Daudy
“Where I’m Calling From”

This exhibition, a gesamtkunstwerk entitled “Where I’m Calling From’, was inspired by events and new friendships made this year in Paris as a Fellow of Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Prior to starting in September 2024, I swam with my best friend and his wife in a race across the Hellespont strait. This is the body of water where Hero and Leander drowned, which Lord Byron swam, which Christopher Marlowe wrote about etc. This swim was a turning point for me and gave me a sense of confidence and alignment.

In Paris I made several new friends including the Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel, with whom we tirelessly discussed books. I also become friends with the Colombian novelist, journalist and poet Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and the Russian poet and writer Maria Stepanova. Conversations with these inspiring individuals got me back to thinking about writing, my first love.

What’s more, being in a new environment with no materials with which to make work, but rather two simple desks in an office, I started writing again. I wrote not just short stories (of whom in my opinion Raymond Carver is the great master, with his set of short stories “Where I’m Calling From” hence the title, as this show represents a snapshot of my frame of mind as I crossed the Hellespont in August) but also poems. I even started illustrating poems and have been commissioned to make a book of my favourite poems by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca and Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

People are always a great inspiration for me and for my work. Another Fellow I loved was the great translator Daniel Levin Becker, a member of the literary group Oulipo, which is famous for the challenges it imposes on its members. The members meet once a month to play with language and innovate through creative mathematical and literary tricks. Oulipo is founded on the principle that constraint provokes and encourages the search for original solutions: “It is necessary to thwart habits to achieve novelty” says Raymond Queneau Thus, the founding members liked to describe themselves as "rats who themselves build the labyrinth from which they intend to escape."

So, as well as the writing and poetry, the total unbinding of my imagination at this wonderful institute, I also felt the courage to impose new constraints on myself as a means of forcing myself to create truly original and innovative work.

For the body of work I am making for Madrid about incremental change, and man’s relationship with nature and history, I have decided to make work with and about honey.

For this show in Zurich with my galerist Lea Bischofberger I thought up some constraints for myself:

Make a site-specific work in just ten days

Use a restrained palette of locally sourced ink, paper and felt, in order that the work be ecologically sound

Focus on this recent year and my relationship with water as a medium of self expression, and of evaluating our current position past/present/future.

I am grateful to Lea for placing the confidence in me to do this, as it was quite a leap of faith for both of us. I feel honoured and proud to be working together with someone who understands and loves what it is to be an artist, and in whom I can entrust my future.