Kate MacDowell is a ceramic artist
who works primarily with porcelain in order to represent life size and
realistic aspects of natures through her sculptures. She discusses ideas of
nature, environment, and our relation to these as humans.
Her process includes making hand
built life size animals and plant-life out of porcelain. Classical and baroque
marble sculpture, or contemporary tomb sculpture, are influences for her choice
of porcelain since its color focuses on form and evokes a ghostly feeling of
negative space to suggest something missing from world.
She enjoys this luminescent and ghost-like quality of
porcelain and the ability of bone-dry repair. She compiles a board of images
from picture books and Google images consisting of scientific drawings,
skeletal sketches for proportions, and photos of road kill and hunting. She
build solid around a newspaper and then hallows out the forms for it to be a
quarter inch thick. Each part is built then stored in a wet box until she is
ready to construct the sculpture together. She repairs throughout the making
and firing process, fixing any cracks that appear due to the nature of
porcelain. The work is then glazed clear in some spots and fired to cone 5.
She discusses the conflict between
our longing for love of the nature environment and our negative impacts on it.
The human body and its organs are transformed and often being taken over by and
or becoming a specific plant. Solastalgia is a dislocation and loss of what
people feel to see their home environment being destroyed or under assault,
which was a beginning focus of her work. The pieces that represent this are a
physical connection between nature and body to refer to psychological
connection. As the viewer, the work suggests that you put yourself in place of
sculpture, experiencing the sensuality, disturbing or unsettling experience of
sympathetic response to piece. The piece Venus, explores the experience of
seduction without using a woman’s body, carnivorous plants bloom from the human
heart. It is the fecundity of natural world is something that she explores
often. Based on mythology, she specifically looks at the sculpture of Daphne
and Apollo discussing the conflict between fear and beauty as the nymph
transforms into a tree the escape rape by Apollo. Her version of this Daphne
sculpture is an experience of a new issue in the environment. The Daphne that
once used nature to be her escape has been cut down in clear-cut zones. It can
be seen as an Ecofeminist analogy. She finds that what is left out is more
important than what is included. Her work forces you to explore the
subconscious and delve into fear of mortality, based on slow and painful rise
and fall of evolutionary species.
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