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Emma Lilley discusses Kate MccGwire’s work Sluice.
Kate MccGwire's work exists in a twilight zone where beauty butts up against ugliness, rapture meets disgust and reason superstition. She will take a commonplace material - most recently the pigeon feather (but she has also worked with chicken wishbones) - and, by re-framing the object, placing it out of context, generate a kind of 'field of attraction' around it. The viewer is left both seduced and alienated, relishing the spectacle but at the same time aware of something disquieting, something 'other'. In so doing, she makes us re-examine our preconceptions - cultural, historical and personal - about the everyday we thought we knew so well. Her instinctively aesthetic approach, pared-down, spare and sensual, ultimately proves treacherous; the feathers invoke a gag-like response at their quasi-parasitic growth, the chicken bone the chill of death and stench of the killing fields. Intrinsic to her method is the collecting and sorting of materials from hundreds of different sources over a period of months, even years. For the feathers, she relies on a loyal network of pigeon-fanciers from all over the UK who regularly send her envelopes stuffed with their birds' moultings. These...
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