Fight and Flight
Longtime gallery artist Kate MacDowell returns to Miami with her solo exhibition Fight and Flight. Continuing her work with hand carved porcelain, MacDowell draws upon the natural world for inspiration.
“My work explores our physical and psychological relationships with the natural world. Whether as proxy, trophy, decorative material, or mythic symbol, animals currently occupy a space in our subconscious which layers history, allegory, and an awareness of species fragility.
The use of fur, feathers, and hide in fashion is in part an extension of prehistoric attempts to clothe and adorn ourselves in order to take on aspects of admired animals. The founding of one of the earliest conservation organizations, the Audubon society, was part of a movement which responded to the contemporary fashion for plumes (and occasionally entire dead birds) on hats. This heavily impacted bird species including the Carolina parakeet that went extinct in 1918 in part due to the demand for their plumage.
Our understanding of animals has historically intertwined with our understanding of ourselves. When we assign meaning and allegory to the natural world it can lead to its preservation or destruction, but it’s always shaped by the experience of being viewed. I was inspired by medieval marginal illustrations of fantastical animal hybrids, often playful, sometimes anthropomorphic in their behavior. I created a series of chimeras that combine specific predatory raptor species with their prey. I was thinking about the delicate balance between a successful hunt and a successful escape that must be achieved in order to survive. These creatures are physically adapting, perhaps transforming due to a changing environment, and negotiating new abilities and power relationships, but they are also being pulled in two directions. Do they belong to the sky or the earth?”
Fantastical and unlikely in form, each delicate sculpture is its own universe. Beaks and claws, tails and shells, each creature a new discovery. Creating contradictory relationships between animals gives us hope. Is it possible that two oppositional beings can cohabitate? Can we begin with nature and create a more perfect universe? In Fight and Flight we can examine the possibilities. Once again MacDowell introduces a new way forward.
About Kate MacDowell
Kate MacDowell’s hand-built porcelain sculptures respond to environmental threats and their consequences, revealing the rifts and frictions between man and nature. Based out of Portland, Oregon, her work has been shown throughout the US and Europe at Scope Miami and New York, Seattle Art Fair, ArtAmsterdam, Art London, London Art Fair, Showoff Paris, Art Paris, Solo Project Basel, NEXT, and Art Chicago fairs. She was an artist in residence at the Kohler Arts and Industry Program and has had work in group exhibits in the Museum of Arts and Design (NY), Banksy’s Dismaland Bemusement Park, MOCA North Miami and Virginia, Urban Nation Museum Berlin, the Fuller Craft Museum and the Muskegon, Akron, Crocker, Biggs, Everson, Canton and Asheville Art Museums.
Her work has been published in books and periodicals including The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Hi-Fructose, American Craft, Ceramics Monthly, Beautiful Bizarre, O.K. Periodicals (NL), Creative Review and Rooms (UK), and Hey! (Paris) among others. Her work was featured on the CD and single cover art for Erasure’s album, Tomorrow’s World and she can be seen sculpting in stop motion in the official audio video for a song on Miike Snow’s III album. She also sculpted individual ‘daemons’ for an HBO campaign associated with the television program His Dark Materials.
