Riding Switch
In snowboarding to ‘ride switch’ is to increase the difficulty, variety, and aesthetic value of riding by assuming whichever stance is the opposite of the preferred one.
To ‘ride switch’ is a counter-intuitive discipline, requiring embodied and cognitive skills, and a desire in the rider to leave their comfort zone.
In Kate Palmer’s paintings, the absence and presence of marks, the smudges, wiped, sanded or sprayed, even their speed or stillness, are conflicting impulses on the surface that come from not being satisfied- there’s a dialectical ‘push and pull’ of ‘I can’t but I must’.
Her process mandates a certain phenomenology that emanates from the stains, mono-printed, and sprayed marks, that explore the visceral and the embodied. These elements are all implicitly part of her performativity as a snowboarder.
” Snowboarding feels like slow rolling mercury, tight and contained but quick and reactive. Sometimes the rhythm of my carved arcs is interrupted, rocks, trees or people needing a sudden response, a recalculation”.