“I have used peacock feathers but they’re so extravagant – it’s hard to make them into something any more beautiful than they already are,” Kate MccGwire explains. One of her pieces exhibited in London at the ‘Angels’ exhibition at James Freeman gallery in north London. She created ‘Liminal’ from white goose feathers specifically for the show, explaining: “I didn’t have an existing work available with the various exhibitions I have on at the moment, so I decided to make something new and a little different – soft, pure, muscular, and tight fitting, writhing about serenely within the cabinet.”
She also has work in two other exhibitions at the moment – one in Hauterives in France and the other in Winterthur in Switzerland. While she values the opportunity to show her work, it can be tricky when shows run concurrently: “Having a busy exhibition schedule is wonderful but also a logistical nightmare. I’ve been in a few exhibitions this year that I haven’t been able to get to and I never thought that would happen! My New Year’s resolution will be to allow at least two days in each city that I exhibit in.”
ArrayOriginally hailing from Norfolk, where her father built boats, the former interior designer decided to change her career after the birth of her second child and returned to university to study fine art. She graduated with her MA from the prestigious Royal College of Art in 2004, and immediately got down to work, having sold the installation from her graduate show (which comprised 23,000 wishbones attached to a wall) to art-collector (and champion of British artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin) Charles Saatchi. She snapped up a barge of her own and shifted her focus to feathers when she moved with her barge to a little island on the River Thames in south-west London.
“There was an industrial shed near my studio which had feral pigeons in it. I started picking their feathers up when I was walking to work in the morning but I didn’t know that the birds only molt twice a year”, she explains. Having realized that she needed significantly more feathers than she could collect, she contacted the owners of racing pigeons and persuaded them to keep the feathers for her.
Convolous by Kate MccGwire, Credit: JP Bland
INCURSION 1 Hermes Tokyo MccGwire 2016 Photo S Asakawa
INCURSION 2 Tokyo 2016 Hermes Photo S Asakawa
INCURSION 3 Hermes Tokyo MccGwire 2016 Photo S Asakawa
She now uses these in her feather sculptures, which can broadly be split into three categories: framed works, which are the closest to 2D pieces and can be hung on a wall, encased works where the sculpture is enclosed by a glass dome or within a cabinet, and installations, where the sculpture ranges in size, with the biggest being around 9m in length, sweeping across a floor.
Due to the painstaking technique of gluing specifically chosen feathers to a base, most works take around a month to create. And that doesn’t even take into account the months spent preparing the feathers – cleaning them, sorting them by colour or style, gluing individual pins to quills – for this MccGwire is lucky to have a team of part-time assistants to help her, “otherwise I’d barely be able to produce anything”, she laughs.
Array“I like to use birds that are natural to the UK, that are non-exotic, and are not being killed for my purposes. The pigeons moult naturally so they’re the most perfect version of what I do. But I work with pheasant feathers as they are shot for game or food and I get the feathers recycled from that. The blue mallard feathers come from people who raise ducks for food. I don’t like anyone killing birds for what I do – I’m trying to treasure something that would normally be thrown away and re-present something that people would think of as disgusting and make something exquisitely beautiful” she expounds.
She no longer lives on her 111-year-old house boat, but continues to use it as her studio. It is moored at the bottom of her garden in Surrey, which allows her to continue her other passion – wild swimming. “I was born on a boatyard and have always been around and in water. The perfect and invigorating way to start my day is to dive from the deck of my barge into the Thames. The river is teeming with wildlife here and I pinch myself every time I have a flypast from the local kingfisher. Swimming in the wild is magical and the only activity I do that allows me to feel 20 again.”
ANOMALY 2017 Kate MccGwire (Photo – JP Bland)
ANOMALY 2017 Kate MccGwire (Photo – JP Bland)
CONUNDRUM 2017 Kate MccGwire – Photo – JP Bland
The fashion industry has also been captivated by MccGwire’s work. When the directors of MoMu, Belgium’s leading fashion museum, asked her to produce work for its 2014 “Birds of Paradise: Plumes & Feathers in Fashion” exhibition, she thought they were joking. But when they turned up to meet with her in London, she knew they weren’t kidding. They asked her to do an installation at the museum in Antwerp which would complement the gowns on show by designers including Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Thierry Mugler.
The exhibition in Belgium introduced MccGwire’s work to a more fashion-obsessed audience, in particular, the design team at Ann Demeulemeester, who also had work featured in the show. They approached MccGwire and asked her to collaborate with them on their Spring/Summer 2016 collection. She made five individual kid leather pieces with quills on them that went around the neck, a gilet, some jewellery, and her feather fabric designs were used for some of the dresses. “It was great seeing them all going down the catwalk – it was quite an amazing moment.”
ArrayDemeulemeester wasn’t the only brand to admire MccGwire’s work. She was also invited to Tokyo to make a number of large installations from rooster feathers for the windows of Hermès’ flagship Ginza store. But MccGwire seems to view the attention from the fashion world as something nice, but not worth taking too seriously.
This is not altogether surprising given the number of significant exhibitions she has had since then. Her 2016 show at La Galerie Particulière in Paris showed some of her existing works, but also introduced the audience to MccGwire’s new ‘drawings’. These were in fact created by maggots, which had been coated in graphite and then crawled across the paper creating beautiful delicate shapes. “The drawings look very beautiful. It’s very close to what I’m thinking about with the overlooked and the discarded and the disgusting. What I hadn’t realized about maggots before I started working with them is that they haven’t got eyes, and their skin is light sensitive so they are pre-programmed to crawl away from the light. I’m hoping people will go ‘urgh, but they’re rather nice’,” she laughs.
TUSSLE by Kate MccGwire – JP Bland –
She has appeared in a number of shows since then, including the Entangled group show at Turner Contemporary which featured over 40 international female artists who use techniques such as embroidery, weaving, and sewing, a large solo show at Galerie Huit in Hong Kong, her enormous sculpture ‘Corvid’ was shown as part of the Iconoclasts exhibition at Saatchi Gallery, and she has had works in the past two Summer Exhibitions at the Royal Academy.
But there is no rest for the wicked. MccGwire is currently hard at work on a largescale site-specific installation for a private collection, which “will be set into the floor with a glass slab over it, so that you can walk over the piece which is writhing under you”. Next March, she will be showing an installation piece at New York’s Armory art fair with Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire and in the same month, her solo show with existing pieces and large new site-specific installation will open at Harewood House in Leeds.
So with all of these exhibitions and with serious collectors like Saatchi, Thomas Olbricht, Avery Agnelli, and the design director for Sonia Rykiel championing her work, it won’t be long until the name of Kate MccGwire is on everybody’s lips.
