Artist42: Kate MccGwire

Kate MccGwire's practice probes the beauty inherent in duality, exploring the play of opposites - at an aesthetic, intellectual and visceral level - that characterises the way we conceive the world. She does this by appealing to our essential duality as human beings, to our senses and our reason, and by drawing on materials capable of embodying a dichotomous way of seeing, feeling and thinking. The finished work has a consistent 'otherness' to it that places it beyond our experience of the world, poised on a threshold between the parameters that define everyday reality.  
      
      -Artist's Statement, Kate MccGwire

Kate MccGwire's work has a really uncanny aesthetic quality. The mix of rich textures, subdued colors, and interesting abstract imagery come together to make something very visually appealing. She seems to fixate on feathers and the burnt edges of paper in her work, each quite similar to the other visually. The sculptures appear at some point in Limbo between life and death, with a sense of organic movement along with a certain lifeless, sterile feeling.

As mentioned before in her artist's statement, she focuses on contradiction, opposites, and complementary extremes in her work. In an interview with Don't Panic, she discusses how she wants to unsettle, feeling for the threshold marking what alarms us or seems out of place. Her sculptures, reminiscent of birds, are "never resolved", with no head to give the viewer bearing on the shape and nature of the "creatures". She says, "For me, my work is a physical manifestation of a state of mind". The state of mind she's talking about is the discomfort found in comfort; the vaguely paradoxical reaction to familiar objects and feeling presented in unfamiliar contexts. In the article, she also discusses finding hundreds of feral pigeon feathers after the flock of birds had molted. This was during the Bird Flu scare and she became interested in the potential for the feather to be seen as both beautiful in form but repulsive in its potential to spread disease.