Artist Statement (or Sorry Mr. Einstein, God does play dice).
Life is not fair. I see this every day in my work as a mental health professional. Sometimes the only answer I can give to the family of an afflicted person as to why their loved one has a terrible illness is “bad luck”.
Chance not only plays a role in health, but also in physics, genetics, accidents, lotteries and the environments we are born into. This both fascinates and frightens me. I realize I don’t have as much control over life as I would wish. It threatens the modern myth of free will.
This interest in chance had led me to using dice throws and statistics in my paintings. I also have learned to respect statisticians. They share the artist's impulse to create order from chaos.
The technique I use is to randomize a field of shapes by throwing two dice and writing the number on the shape. From the thirty-six permutations I can make a statistical analysis by mathematically working out a probability distribution. I then paint the colours according to the distribution. The result is a painting packed with populations of different coloured “beans”. The title of the painting describes the subject of the analysis. Subjects I have tackled to date are global distributions of wealth, various indicators of well-being, health issues, and death used by Statistics Canada, the World Bank and the World Health Organization.
Kate Hemenway is a graduate of Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC.