Kate Youme is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves between physical materials and digital systems, the body and the network, the poetic and the procedural. Her work is concerned with intimacy as both method and site. Often asking how structures of shame, control, and desire shape our relationships with ourselves, each other, and our technologies.

Youme works across watercolor, beeswax, glue, paper, coding, automation and AI. She layers analog tactility with algorithmic precision. Her practice often begins with questions: Who gets to name intimacy? What systems dictate how we feel, perform, or confess? What does it mean to eroticize code? Through these questions, she stages encounters with text, material, or computation. Each work invites reflection on the architectures of love, submission, and identity.

Her ongoing project ME. (you) Made Me, 2025 is an autonomous, AI-powered dominatrix (ME.) trained on Youme’s own physical likeness. But designed to function as a digital, algorithmic sex worker and performance system. ME. (you) Made Me, explores algorithmic dominance/submission and the aesthetics of coded power. The project examines how automation reshapes gender, desire, and labor in an increasingly machine-mediated world.

Other major works include Sext & Response, an interactive archive of real "sexts” (sex-messages) and replies. Her Apology Period is a confessional series of paintings documenting the artist’s rupture and repair of her identity. And The Youme Diamonds is a transformation of the artist’s body hair into an engineered diamond. A work that converts a stigmatized and controlled material into an object of capitalist erotic currency.

Youme’s research draws from sex work theory, BDSM practice, AI ethics, feminist philosophy, attachment science, and somatic poetics. She is particularly interested in how digital intimacy performs labor: how sexts, posts, or AI personas will become carriers of affect, shame, and attention. Her work is influenced by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Nancy Friday, Hartmut Böhme, Audre Lorde, Jack Morin, Esther Perel, and Marshall Rosenberg, as well as the lived knowledge of marginalized: lovers, communities and machines.

Trained at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, Youme lives and works between London and Los Angeles. Her work aims not to solve but to expose, to surface the power beneath pleasure, the algorithms within longing, and the poetics behind control.