Kit's work is a complex, multilayered world of poetic imagination and private reference. She creates poetic visual objects for contemplation, rather than pictures of things.
The working components of Kit's collages and paintings combine pictorial techniques of modernist abstraction. Much of the pleasure of her collages comes from her wonderful shapes, use of repetition of shapes, her extremely expressive lines, her colors, her textures-in short, the abstract formal elements of art-in the modern tradition.
Kit combines these with the realism of the photographic fragment-in both her media-and the variety of ways that she uses the photograph is marvelous-sometimes by itself, more often combined with drawing and painting. We see the photograph as integral to her work-or not-it might be an element of serendipity that adds a note not rigidly programmed. While she has created a style (we recognize a Gilbert instantly) we are always intrigued with the variety of expression.
Kit's work comes out of the Abstract Expressionist tradition: it is about shape and mark as extremely expressive devices-expressive of feelings and sensations directly, not via any depiction and description of objects-the emotion fraught gestures of abstract expressionism and the color shapes of the color field wing of abstract expressionism.
In other words, Kit has developed her own abstract language which comes out of the formal properties of art, and from the real world around her in the form of photographs, and out of herself-her memories of landscape forms, her longings and desires, and out of discoveries in other artists and developments over time. There has never been a time in her life when she was not painting and drawing.
Chance plays a role, but not as major a role as in the work of Kurt Switters, who is one of the artists I think of most in connection with Kit. He created his poetic collages out of rubbish, from everyone's lives as well as his own. Kit, by her own avowal, creates more exclusively out of the rubbish of her own life. Here is the Surrealist kicker: since the rubbish of our lives, like the contents of our un-consciousnesses-are all similar, we connect with her work.
When I listed the main three things coming together in Kit's work I did not mention Cubism. She does not use collage in Cubist tradition. Their aim is formal, overwhelmingly intellectual, and the effect aimed at is one of compensation: painted paper for painted canvas, snip of scissors in place of brush, and glue to imitate smudges of paint. As in Dada and then Surrealist collage tradition, the elements of Kit's collages are ones endowed in their own right with an independent existence and they retain that. Kit piles up images-double, triple, multiple layers-like the persistence and rapidity and intensity we are used to in the images from our dreams and visions of half sleep.
Kit deals with meaning in modern art in that the main content is expression of feelings through the formal means of art directly-dealing with what is innate and inside. Her art seems to hover between meaning and the futility of finding any meaning at all in all this beauty: and that is very modern.
