Cabinet of Wonder (2) Kate Mac Dowell's Porcelain Artefacts

Ants ate all my sugar

Bad Seed 

God of Change 
All rights reserved © Kate Mac Dowell

Visual Artist Kate Mac Dowell, of Portland, Oregon USA depicts a world of unsettling conflicts between our romantic ideal of union with nature and our contemporary impact on the environment.   She hand sculpts each piece out of porcelain, after building a solid form and then hollowing it out. "A piece also speaks to me of ghosts or negative space. It suggests something missing in the world," she says.  She sees each piece as a captured and preserved specimen, a painstaking record of endangered natural forms , a commentary on our own culpability. " I chose porcelain for its luminous and ghostly qualities,  it highlights both the impermanence and fragility of natural forms in a dying ecosystem." Her  exquisite detailed narratives draw upon the Italian baroque, the classical mythology and metaphysical poems of Oliver Cromwell's time as well as references to the kitsch defined by Odd Nerdrum.  To know more about her, I recommend the interview by Lobster and Canary and her website Kate Mac Dowell.

Galerie Vanessa Quang, 5bis, rue de Beauce 75003 Paris
Bo Lee Gallery, Queen Street, Bath, BA1 1 HE, UK