Kate Mccgwire
Kate Mccwire ‘s primary medium is feathers — usually naturally shed or discarded feathers collected through a network including pigeon fanciers, gamekeepers, farmers, and members of the public.
Rigorously organized: feathers are cleaned, sorted by colour, shape, size. Some are trimmed. She and her assistants catalogue these to build “palettes” of feathers.
Kate Mccgwire works often involve covering armatures or substrates with feathers, laying them in tight arrangements so they suggest surfaces like plumage, scales, musculature.
Part of a lineage of artists working with organic materials and soft sculpture, but MccGwire’s work tends to push more into the uncanny, the borderline grotesque — she uses materials often considered minor or waste to evoke powerful aesthetic, psychological responses.
The use of feathers is both formal (texture, colour, form) and symbolic: themes of shedding, renewal, decay, what is discarded. There is often tension between what is beautiful and what is “outsider” or “unclean.”
Kate Mccgwire is interested in how objects hold memory, associations, myth, biology, how something small (a feather) carries scales of metaphor. Her works often provoke visceral reactions.
The exhibition GLITCH at Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris (2025) – exploring darker sides of beauty, tension, seduction & fear.
