The University Art Gallery is delighted to present Falls the Shadow by Kate Teale, on view in the University Art Gallery January 16 through March 30, 2026.
Teale’s graphite and charcoal drawings—however simple their means, and however stripped down their subject matter—are laden with meaning.
These drawings do not render objects, but voids, doorways filled with tactile shadow. They are controlled and careful, and perfectly quiet. They wait.
Representing doorways, tunnels, and windows, Teale manipulates architectural space, making walls disappear. She distills meaning in the representation and experience of thresholds, points of transition between shelter and destruction, between confinement and escape. Doorways “make visual the transition from darkness into light—or the reverse.” A doorway divides two worlds, and requires a choice.
More than metaphor or representation, these drawings require embodied understanding. Drawing, for Teale, “[should] be something we experience in our bodies and process in our sub-conscious.
The drawings included in Falls the Shadow are the result of the artist’s 2023 residency at Christ Church College, Oxford, U.K. Their gothic forms echo, and are echoed by, the architecture of the University of the South’s campus, deliberately designed to recall that of its English predecessors.
New York-based artist Kate Teale received her MA from Oxford University, England, her Art Diploma from City and Guilds of London Art School and her MFA from Hunter College, C.U.N.Y. She teaches at the Parsons School of Design, New York, NY.
