Kate MccGwire: Powerfully Quiet
Photos courtesy of Tessa Angus
Kate MccGwire creates spellbinding, darkly sensual sculptures by layering feathers over serpentine structures. Referencing mobius strips, these forms seem to curl in and undulate within themselves, the densely packed and perfectly placed feathers adding both an organic quality and flow to each piece. The viewer’s eye naturally follow the feathers much like watching the flow of a river, giving an illusion of gently writhing movement in each piece—which seem to either twist in an infinity loop or explode in a startling burst, like a jet of water bursting through a wall.
MccGwire has worked with organic, natural materials such as wood and bone for several years, but it is her feather sculptures that seem to have really put her on the art map, for they are truly astonishing in both workmanship as well as the profound sense of power they emanate. Whether it is small sculptures encased in their own tiny bell jars to huge room-sized installations, the sheer volume of feathers needed to create each sculpture is astonishing.
The three meter long, sculpture “Corvid” used over 10,000 feathers for example, and it took years to collect enough of them!
This constant and laborious search for materials necessitates that MccGwire source feathers all over her country of England through a network of pigeon racers, gamekeepers, and members of the general public. She sees this collaboration between herself and the feather collectors who help her as being integral as well as inspiring to her creation process. She is also one of the seemingly few artists who actually not only acknowledges her contributors and assistants, but also thanks them publicly on her website as well! One of the few things she does not choose to speak about too much is her actual construction of the sculptures. While the feathers are attached with the help of able hands-the actual underlying structure is conceptualized and created by MccGwire alone-and she is reticent to speak too much more about it. This keeps the work a bit mysterious and tantalizing to ruminate about.
…in doing so I create a shift from a world in which objects sit in their conventional place and allow a new perspective, exposing the viewer, in the most visceral way possible, to the truths that lurk behind the familiar…
She does grant that the different feathers or materials guide her and that she primarily is interested in how to create harmony by juxtaposing materials with concepts, and says that much trial and error is what brought her to the point she is at today. Allowing how her work toys with a sense of a dark beauty, she seeks to fill the viewer with both apprehension and wonder. She says, “Much of my practice references Freud’s unheimlich (literally, “the unhomely”), the idea, to quote Freud, of “a place where the familiar can somehow excite fear.” It also embraces artistic notions of the Abject. In doing so I create a shift from a world in which objects sit in their conventional place and allow a new perspective, exposing the viewer, in the most visceral way possible, to the truths that lurk behind the familiar and to the reality of what it is to be human-a brutal but also unrelentingly beautiful consciousness of the ugly and the funereal, fear and disgust.”
This idea of dichotomy is part of the appeal as well as the unsettling nature of the work. The work touches gently on the idea of the grotesque-not in the sense of the work being unappealing or lacking in beauty, but more for its feel of the uncanny. When looking at the work, in particular the feather pieces, our minds read “bird” but the shapes cause a subtle discordance. This tilt in recognition jars us while the fluid shape of the sculptures also sooth us. The work is dreamy and almost mystical with its references to the eternal, but we also wonder about the very physical beings the feathers came from. In some of the larger installation work-the astronomical amount of feathers used in also discomfiting, not to mention what is being said in works such as the mesmerizing “Evacuate,” where we see a whirling torrent of feathers bursting forth from a kitchen, undoubtedly the scene of years of dinners featuring the corpses of the birds the feathers were stripped from. The work can be read multiple ways at the same time: one person’s beauty is another’s subtle horror, or even causes both reactions in one viewer at the same time.
I want it to seem like if you look closely it may be breathing.”
The sinuous coils that twist and swirl in each sculpture are inspired by the natural world, which the artist has always been fascinated by. Whirlpools, hair, and even intestinal worms alongside classical images such as the famous Greek sculpture of Lacoon, inspired the artist in how these forms create both a writhing movement but also invoke a sense of tension. There is always an underlying feeling of something chaotic about to break loose. This juxtaposition of tensely reined-in power combined with the sense of transcendence (evoked by the archetypal symbolism of the feathers) is what helps create a sense of something profoundly spiritual in the viewer.
She says: “That sense of the dormant living is certainly intentional in my work, I want it to seem like if you look closely it may be breathing.”
The success of these sculptures is that they manage to capture a frozen moment of unstoppable, dynamic life force. In addition, these works seem to have an absence of a “maker’s mark”… they look as though they have spontaneously appeared rather than been created. This is done purposefully by the artist, who feels it gives the work an otherworldly feel-as the artist puts it, to make it “seethe quietly, powerful yet trapped.”*
MccGwire has a retrospective exhibition coming up at Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham University UK from the 20th of September to the 4th of January.
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