Kate Garner

Kate Garner
Born	Kathryn Mary Garner (1954-07-09) 9 July 1954 (age 70) Wigan, Lancashire
Nationality	British
Known for	Artist

Kathryn Mary Garner (born 9 July 1954) ^[1] is a British photographer, fine artist and singer.

Early life

Garner was born in Wigan, Lancashire to Anne Philomena Shannon and George Sandeman Garner, a factory worker and a sailor. She was expelled from high school at the age of 16, and became a runaway who joined The Children of God. To escape the grasp of the cult, she hitchhiked from London through eastern Europe to India in 1970, where she lived for a year before being located by her parents. She attended art school at Blackpool; later she moved to London, where she began to both photograph and model for magazines such as The Face and i-D .^{[ citation needed ]}

Career

Garner first came into the public eye as one third of the 1980s avant-garde, new wave pop project Haysi Fantayzee, along with other members Jeremy Healy and Paul Caplin. Emanating from street arts scenes such as the Blitz Kids that were cropping up in London in the early 1980s, Haysi Fantayzee's music combined reggae, country and electro with political and sociological lyrics couched as nursery rhymes. ^[2]

Haysi Fantayzee combined their extreme clothes sense – described ^[3] as combining white Rasta, tribal chieftain and Dickensian styles – with a quirky musical sound comparable to other new wave musical pop acts of the era, such as Bow Wow Wow, Adam and the Ants and Bananarama. ^[4] They appeared several times on the BBC Television programme Top of the Pops . Despite being touted by David Bowie's producer Tony Visconti as the next big thing, ^[5] the group quickly disbanded after releasing three hit singles, "John Wayne Is Big Leggy", "Shiny Shiny" and "Holy Joe", and an album, Battle Hymns for Children Singing , that went gold. ^[6]

Garner then returned to painting, photography and video, launching a successful media arts career, starting with her collaboration with Sinéad O'Connor, in which she created memorable images of O'Connor for her 1987 debut, The Lion and the Cobra . Garner has since photographed a wide range of musicians and celebrities, including David Bowie,Twigs, Bjork, Yoko Ono, John Galliano, and Kate Moss. ^[7] Her work has appeared in the American and British versions of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar as well as W magazine, Interview , i-D, The Face, GQ , Vanity Fair , Elle and The Sunday Times .^{[ citation needed ]}

She had her first multimedia exhibition in February 2007 at the Painter's Gallery on Charing Cross Road, London, and a year later had an exhibition in San Francisco, California, titled 'Identity Artists'. ^[8] She has shown at/with Galerie13 and Art Cube in Paris. ^[9]

References

1. Larkin, Colin (2006). Haysi Fantayzee. In The Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Oxford University Press.
2. "medic alert services". Haysifantayzee.net. Archived from the original on 17 August 2009. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
3. Peter Holt writing in the "Ad Lib" column in London newspaper the Evening Standard, 16 June 1983
4. New Musical Express, 10 July 1982
5. "Haysi Fantayzee's Kate Garner at Work on New Music and New Sound". Happyukulele.com. 12 May 2011. Archived from the original on 11 April 2013. Retrieved 13 May 2013.
6. "N/K". Financial Times . 18 June 2008. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
7. Maloney, D (April 2009). "Haysi pop art wallpaper". Gay Times . No. 367.
8. "Varnish Fine Art". 29 September 2007. Archived from the original on 29 September 2007. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
9. "Jeannette Mariani, Paris: Anne Brunet, Carlos Enriquez-Gonzalez, Danidan, Espira, Koharutie, Nina Dotti, Pepe Lopez, Sabrina Montiel-Soto, Todd Narbey, U235". Galerie13jm.com. Retrieved 2 August 2020.