American · Contemporary ceramics
Kate MacDowell
Kate MacDowell is an American sculptor based in Portland, Oregon, who hand-builds white porcelain works fusing human anatomy with animals and plants, such as lungs filled with canaries, to dramatize the damage people do to the natural world.
2 works in the collection
Works by Kate MacDowell
Kate MacDowell is an American artist based in Portland, Oregon, who makes hand-built sculptures in white porcelain. Her pieces combine human bodies and organs with animals and plants: a fox curled around a human skull, a heart sprouting roots, a brain opening onto a forest. Her stated subject is the conflict between a romantic ideal of harmony with nature and the reality of human impact on the environment.
Life in brief
MacDowell came to ceramics after a first career outside art. She studied English and American literature at Brown University in the 1990s and spent a period working overseas. After returning to the United States in 2004 she studied ceramics full time, at the ArtCenter in Carrboro, North Carolina, and then at Portland Community College and the Oregon College of Art and Craft. She has also studied flame-worked glass at the Penland School of Crafts and held residencies including the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine and the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry program in Wisconsin (2012). Her work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe.
Style and technique
MacDowell builds each piece by hand rather than casting from molds, carving fine detail such as feathers, leaf veins and the cellular texture of tissue into the clay before firing. She has said she chose porcelain for its luminous, ghostly quality and its ability to hold fine texture, and for the paradox that it is fragile yet can survive for thousands of years. Most works are left white or nearly so, which lets the human and animal parts read as a single substance, closer to a relic or a fossil than to a living body.
Key works
In Canary 3 a pair of porcelain lungs opens to reveal small canaries perched inside, a direct reference to the canaries once carried into coal mines as an early warning of poisonous gas. The body becomes the mine, and the birds become a warning about the air we breathe. Solastalgia (2010) cuts open a human brain to show a miniature eucalyptus forest with a koala. Its title is the philosopher Glenn Albrecht's word for the distress of seeing one's home environment degraded.
Where to see her work
MacDowell's sculptures are shown through galleries and craft exhibitions and are mostly in private collections. For related work, see Jean-Michel Bihorel's flower-filled bodies and Memento Mori & Vanitas.
Questions & answers
Who is Kate MacDowell?
Kate MacDowell is a Portland, Oregon, sculptor who hand-builds porcelain works combining human anatomy with animals and plants. Her pieces, such as Canary 3 and Solastalgia, address environmental damage and our relationship with nature.
Why does Kate MacDowell use porcelain?
She has said she chose porcelain for its luminous, ghostly quality and its ability to hold very fine detail, and for its paradox of being fragile yet able to last for thousands of years, which suits her themes of vulnerability.
What does Canary 3 mean?
Canary 3 shows canaries inside a pair of porcelain lungs. It recalls the canaries miners took underground to warn of toxic gas, turning the human body into the mine and the birds into a warning about air pollution.