Kate MacDowell looks at the world in the way I'd imagine a surgeon living in the earliest days of the Age of Enlightenment might view theirs, inside and out, and wherever information is lacking, through her own slightly surreal imagination. She is a highly skilled sculptor with a penchant for stretching the qualities of pure white porcelain to meet her highly individual needs, be it to portray a human brain, unborn birds, lungs, or the workings of the inner ear. However don't expect her works to be coldly objective, in fact they exude quite the opposite. Nature seems to spawn from every orifice in almost every one of her inquisitive pieces, faces sprawl with root networks, insects and flesh wrap together in a disturbing state of ecological ecstasy. Her works, in all honesty, have to be seen to be understood.

Here's Kate MacDowell's statement of intent: "These pieces are in part responses to environmental stresses including climate change, toxic pollution, and gm crops.  They also borrow from myth, art history, figures of speech and other cultural touchstones.  In some pieces aspects of the human figure stand-in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world.  In others, animals take on anthropomorphic qualities when they are given safety equipment to attempt to protect them from man-made environmental threats.  In each case the union between man and nature is shown to be one of friction and discomfort with the disturbing implication that we too are vulnerable to being victimized by our destructive practices."

It's fascinating how deftly she can both recreate any form, material, or texture and yet seamlessly meld and blend one with another, something of a feat as far as sculpture is concerned. The fact that all her works display the stark white hues of porcelain add to this effect, the liquidity of life manifest, heightening the sense as the viewer's mind cajoles with it's own perception of individuality be it physically, emotionally or a meeting of the two. Her works summon up more than an environmental tenet, they seep into the subconscious, and delve into fears of mortality, the slow and painful rise and fall of an evolutionary species, and indeed the collapse of the surface, the perception that what one sees is what one believes.

I'd even go as far as say there is something rather funereal about MacDowell's sculptures, almost a testament or tribute to a civilisation lost, or one that soon will be if we continue to ravage our planet as our needs dictate. You can see Kate MacDowell's portfolio at www.katemacdowell.com.
 

This post is tagged anatomy, Kate MacDowell, sculptor, sculpture, surreal, surrealism