Kate MccGwire’s Marvellous Menagerie by Dr Catriona McAra
An in-conversation celebrating a major new monograph on the mesmerizing sculptures of English artist Kate MccGwire! She is joined by essayist Catriona McAra to explore the themes of the feminine grotesque that have come to characterize MccGwire’s work. McAra will trace over two decades of MccGwire’s career as it segues through the lessons of soft sculpture, surrealism and postminimalism, drawing from the likes of Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Dorothea Tanning towards the raw animal masses of Berlinde De Bruyckere and others.
The book is published by Anomie Publishing, edited by Mark Sanders and designed and produced by Peter B. Willberg. It features essays by curators and writers, Catriona McAra and Jane Neal. Now available: Kate MccGwire | (anomie-publishing.com)
Biographies
Kate MccGwire is an internationally recognized sculptor known for her distinctive aesthetic formula and innovative use of feathers. The feminine grotesque and the uncanny have sustained a significant hold over MccGwire’s creative imagination over the last twenty years, with interlocking thought-forms and otherworldly beings dominating her oeuvre. Her muscular, epic, knot-like artworks exploit dichotomous feelings of revulsion and desire, troubling boundaries of the wild and the civilized.
Dr Catriona McAra is Assistant Director, Heritage Collections and Curation at the University of St Andrews. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary art history with particular interests in feminist-surrealist legacies. Her forthcoming books include Ilana Halperin: Felt Events (MIT and Strange Attractor, 2021) and The Medium of Leonora Carrington (Manchester University Press, 2022). Recent writing on MccGwire includes ‘Boundary Creatures’ (Anomie, 2021) and ‘Menagerie’ (C8, 2020).