Sluice 2008, Mixed media with Pigeon feathers, 4.5 x 2.5 x 0.5 m.
Sluice 2008, detail.
Kate MccGwire’s work exists in a twilight zone where beauty butts up against ugliness, the human and ‘bodily’ against the animal; an otherworldly place where rapture meets disgust and reason superstition.
She will take an everyday material or object – most recently the pigeon feather – and, by re-framing it, entice the viewer into examining their preconceptions. The viewer is left both seduced and alienated, relishing the spectacle but at the same time aware of something disquieting, something ‘other’. Her instinctively aesthetic approach – pared-down, spare and sensual – ultimately proves treacherous, the feathers invoking a gag-like response at their parasitic growth (see ‘Sluice’) or fear that the apparently inanimate creature may at any moment stir into being (‘Rile’).
The shift from a world in which objects sit in their ‘natural’ place allows us a new perspective, simultaneously exposing us, in the most visceral way possible, to the macabre truths that lurk behind the familiar and the falsehoods that cloud our vision.
The Space Between:
"In a world where we can be here, there and everywhere, where there is the promise that we can be anyone or anything if only we try hard enough, are good enough, we increasingly find ourselves in a Space Between. A space between being and becoming: a place of transformation and translation, rich with longing, melancholy and fantasy. A space that calls not for representation but presentation, for who knows what we are or what we might become? The act of presentation in/from the Space Between allows us to reflect on these oscillating states of being, providing a moment’s pause to stop and contemplate the state of flux in which we live."
She will take an everyday material or object – most recently the pigeon feather – and, by re-framing it, entice the viewer into examining their preconceptions. The viewer is left both seduced and alienated, relishing the spectacle but at the same time aware of something disquieting, something ‘other’. Her instinctively aesthetic approach – pared-down, spare and sensual – ultimately proves treacherous, the feathers invoking a gag-like response at their parasitic growth (see ‘Sluice’) or fear that the apparently inanimate creature may at any moment stir into being (‘Rile’).
The shift from a world in which objects sit in their ‘natural’ place allows us a new perspective, simultaneously exposing us, in the most visceral way possible, to the macabre truths that lurk behind the familiar and the falsehoods that cloud our vision.
The Space Between:
"In a world where we can be here, there and everywhere, where there is the promise that we can be anyone or anything if only we try hard enough, are good enough, we increasingly find ourselves in a Space Between. A space between being and becoming: a place of transformation and translation, rich with longing, melancholy and fantasy. A space that calls not for representation but presentation, for who knows what we are or what we might become? The act of presentation in/from the Space Between allows us to reflect on these oscillating states of being, providing a moment’s pause to stop and contemplate the state of flux in which we live."
Brood 2004, 23,000 chicken wishbones, 540 x 700 cm.
Insular (detail) 2008, 100 layers of paper burnt, 77 x 57 x 1 cm.
Snare 2007, Reflective tape and string, dimensions variable.a+. kate mccgwire via fabrik project
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