MOON SONG
Cloverleaf Press announces the 2020 publication of the limited edition portfolio MOON SONG, a collaboration between photographer Kate Breakey, poet Stacey Forbes, and book artist Jace Graf.
The MOON SONG portfolio contains fifteen 11" square original photographs by Breakey. Each signed and numbered print is attached with photo corners in a paper folio, and across from each print in its folio is a foil-stamped Forbes poem.
The fifteen prints in folios, plus front and back matter, are enclosed in an archival drop-spine box crafted by Graf at Cloverleaf Studio.
Ten Quail Eggs
Cloverleaf Press announces the 2020 publication of the limited edition portfolio TEN QUAIL EGGS, a collaboration between photographer Kate Breakey and book artist Jace Graf.
The TEN QUAIL EGGS portfolio contains ten hand-colored digital archival images by Breakey. Each 4" print is signed, numbered, and enclosed in a museum-quality 8 ply 8" square hinged mat. The ten matted photographs, plus front and back matter, are enclosed in an archival drop-spine box crafted by Graf at Cloverleaf Studio.
Painted Light
“I begin with a silver photographic image, a kind of evidence. Then I paint on this in many transparent layers of oil paint and pencil. If I am lucky, the media combine and become enmeshed, a curious union of what was real with my own exaggerations and embellishments, so I can show how beautiful it all is—the light, the form, the texture, and color—because I am a sensualist, and this is my deepest pleasure, my lovely addiction.”
—Kate Breakey
Painted Light is the first career retrospective of Breakey's work. With images from nine suites of photographs, including Laws of Physics, Principles of Mathematics, Still Life, Loose Ends, Memories and Dreams, Cactus, and Small Deaths, it encompasses a quarter century of prolific image-making and reveals the wide range of Breakey's creative explorations. In her introduction and throughout the book, Breakey offers personal accounts of "the things that matter most" to her life as an artist and traces her influences, among them her fascination with classical European painting, her close connection to the world of science, and her heartfelt love of the natural world, which began during her childhood in rural Australia. These texts give considerable insight into Breakey's beautiful images, creative process, and transformative journey "to distill observations into a visual language in which they can be contemplated"—the motive that inspires all of Breakey's work.
Los Sombras
Las sombras, the shadows, are literally that—shadows left behind when Kate Breakey places objects on photosensitive paper and shines light on them. And yet, in the inevitable reversal of photography, these shadows are full of light—and more than light. Breakey’s luminous images of coyotes and whipsnakes, hopping mice and scorpions, are filled with her love of the American Southwest, which is now her home, and the animals, plants, and insects that inhabit it. As she says, “The natural world is full of wondrous things to look at and to chronicle and catalogue. In my own way, I have devoted myself to that end.”
Las Sombras/The Shadows presents new work that Kate Breakey has created since moving to Arizona in 1999. Making pictures without a camera, like early nineteenth-century photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, Breakey also shares their affinity for recording the natural world in scientific detail, as well as with artistic beauty. Breakey’s contact prints, known as photograms or photogenic drawings, have the sepia-toned look of Victorian illustrations, yet their sensibility is distinctly modern. In the way she poses the animals, Breakey’s coyotes and rabbits dance; her birds fly. Accompanying the images is an essay by poet Lia Purpura, in which she invites las sombrasto spark her own investigation of shadows, of the absence that paradoxically becomes a kind of presence, especially when held in a photograph. This revealing conversation between images and words opens up a new way of seeing, a discovery of substance in shadows.
Small Deaths
Small lives end every day—the unfledged bird fallen from its nest, the unwary lizard caught by a cat—as unnoticed in dying as they were living. Deeply moved by these small deaths since her childhood in South Australia, photographer-artist Kate Breakey has been photographing found animal remains since the mid-1990s, creating stunning, oversized, hand-colored images that—paradoxically—glow with life.
This volume is the first book-length work devoted to the photographs of Kate Breakey. It gathers color images from her ongoing "Small Deaths" series. These birds, flowers, lizards, and insects vividly express Breakey's desire to preserve each lost creature—to "freeze it in time, suspend it in space, immortalize it so that its beauty and its death are memorialized." In a brief afterword, Breakey traces the origins of her art to a childhood spent among domestic and rescued animals on the Australian coast. In the introduction, noted art critic A. D. Coleman links Breakey's work to the larger traditions of still-life painting and the postmortem photography of the nineteenth century.
Slowlight
Published by the Etherton Gallery, Slowlight by Kate Breakey offers a previously unseen selection of landscapes taken over the artist's 30-year career. Primarily known for her portraits of birds and flowers, Breakey's landscapes offer a different perspective on her view of the surrounding world. The photographs are often subtle, quiet depictions of ephemeral moments and are beautifully printed in this thoughtfully designed edition.
Birds/Flowers
Two separate series—Birds on one side and Flowers on the other—are featured in this beautifully produced accordion-fold artist's book. For several years now, Breakey has been memorializing the small creatures that live and die in our proximity in large format photographs that are vibrantly hand-colored. She has used the same technique with flowers, producing extraordinary results.
Hand made and bound accordion book by Jace Graf and Cloverleaf Studio. 24 color illustrations of Kate Breakey's hand tinted images. 12 birds one direction, 12 flowers on reverse.
Out Of Print