Statement
Kathryn Maguire is a visual artist and educator who works in Sligo. She holds a Masters in Sculpture from Royal College of Art. A BA in Fine Art Sculpture from CCAD and MA in Art in the Contemporary World from NCAD. Her practice engages text, sculpture, video, and installation; making diverse cultural references linking the past with the contemporary. Exploring geology, the history of materials, building materials, and the circular economy. Her practice concentrates on lithics, minerals, mining, and knowing place from the mantle up. Maguire is examining rocks and minerals and fossils in various international locations. Increasingly, her work engages processes of making, informed by her earlier training as a jewellery-maker and sculptor. She attempts to understand the experience of complexities of deep time visible in materials.
She engages questions arising in the Greek Philosophers and an understanding of materials as means to both artistic production and revealing of laws in the Physical World. Using performance as ‘survey/workshop/lab’ a connection between artist and scientist is explored; creating and presenting demonstrative elements in the gallery and the field. Often an expert is involved, a source of knowledge rooted in real scientific phenomena. Attempts to reveal fundamental and invisible forces and energies, explored by scientists and experts alike, is central to Maguire’s practice. New works have used scientific technology to reveal the micron worlds that we inhabit and we host.
Kathryn’s practice incorporates socially engaged projects and environmental awareness projects. She creates sculptural installations and interventions, using a diverse range of materials and weaving her visual arts practice with educational facilitation methods, to explore ideas with communities and within the gallery space. Currently, her work is focused on voices of the forgotten and the dead, the silenced and the non-human, exploring how these voices might have agency in memory and history.
Biography
Residencies & Awards: Leitrim Sculpture Centre Exhibition Residency 2024. Kings Culture Artist in Residence, Kings College & Natural History Museum, London, 2023, Interface Science & Art International Residency; Pasajist, Istanbul & Leitrim Sculpture Centre 2023. GroundWork residency in Norfolk, UK 2022. The London Metallomics Group. The Magnetism Group, Artist in Residence (R&D), CRANN, Trinity College Dublin, 2020. Fish Factory, East Iceland, funded by Arts Council/DLR Council, 2019. Sim House, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2018/2014,2024. Arts Council Artist in the Community R&D Award with mentoring by Vaari Claffey 2022. Spatial Structures Artist Mentoring with Workhouse Callan 2022.Arts Council Agility Award, 2021. Arts Council Travel & Training Award 2019. DLR CoCo Creative Bursary 2019. DLR Co Co Artists Bursary 2016. Arts Council Artist in the Community Award 2016. Firestation Studios Sculpture Bursary Award 2016.
Selected Exhibitions include St Josphys School, Istanbul, Turkey 2024. Leitrim Sculpture Centre 2024, Clifden Arts Festival 2023, Bush House Arcade, Kings College London 2023, Groundwork Gallery, Kings Lynn, Norfolk. 2022. Earthly Bodies, Angel, London 2022. RCA Degree show 2022. Social Fabric, Liberty Hall, Dublin, 2018. Nasty Women, Pallas Projects, 2017. We Claim, Eden Quay, 2016 /2017. Terra Incognita, Platform Arts, Belfast, 2016. The Balloon, Rawson Projects, New York, 2014. Interactivos12?, Science Gallery, Dublin, 2012. Dublin Contemporary 2011. Notes of Protest, Wyspa Institute of Art, Poland, 2010. No Soul For Sale, Tate Modern, London, 2010 & Dia Centre, New York, 2009. Video Killed the Radio Star, RHA, Dublin, 2010.
Share: