Kate McElroy 2024

Kate McElroy
1 to 30 March 2024

Studio open to the public on Friday and Saturday

My work captures an atmosphere of constant growth and a simultaneous sense of incipient destruction. I fixate the viewers’ perception on the process of change itself, suspending them in a sense of transformation. I create dynamic installations using photography, film, performance, found materials and sound, drawing on multifarious aspects of the environment to create new ambiguous spaces for contemplation, stretching the sense of perception. Coalescing a sense of space and time, the work highlights a moment of precarity. A space between construction and deconstruction.

This will be my fourth residency at Uillinn. The space and time of this studio residency has always been very formative to my practice and I will use this opportunity to experiment with installation possibilities between the varied elements of my work. How the work is installed and relate to each other in dynamic ecology is very important for the work and having a studio space like this allows me to weave the multifarious elements together.

My work captures elements on the edge of abstraction, stretching the usual register of perception. I present an ambiguity, so the viewer has space to recreate and move beyond the visible. The work often implements an optical oscillation, through this it subtly suggests a malleable, unfixed reality. The work captures a place in process, simultaneously constructing and deconstructing. It highlights a betweenness, where definitive boundaries dissolve . . .
. . ,
Through correlating various media from our current social reality and re-presenting materials often discarded and overlooked, I prise open a gap.

An opening, to consider an alternative___

At the culmination of my residency I will have an open studio display open to the public where I will be present to have open dialogue inviting feedback from the public. I will draw on my previous experience using Visual Thinking Strategies and from my engagement work at Uillinn to elicit conversation and feedback from participants. I am happy to connect with any small groups or communities of interest during this time.

The experience of the work on the viewer, the individual’s response and developing relationship and knowledge through dialogue is of special interest to me. The work becomes more alive when the ideas and impressions can be shared, creating new strands of thought, which can act as catalysts for change.

Open Studio
Saturday 8 March 11 am to 3 pm
At this Open Studio, Kate weaves together sculpture, installation, light, photography, and sound in a dynamic interplay. Expanding on ideas from her solo show Restructuring Elements and offering a glimpse into her upcoming group show Liquid Urbanism at the Lab Gallery, she engages with materials drawn from our built environment bending, softening, and reconfiguring them. Through this process, she questions the sustainability of our current systems and structures, opening up space to consider how they might be reshaped. In this interstitial space, at a moment of societal flux, the solid turns fluid, the constructed unfixes, offering a site of possibility for interaction, reimagining and reconfiguring.

Kate McElroy is a Cork based artist who graduated with a First Class Honours Master’s Degree in Art and Process, MTU Crawford, 2021. Since graduating she has exhibited in 20 national and international exhibitions and co-founded the artist collective inter_site. Recent exhibitions include Error: /undefined, Pallas Projects, Dublin, and Oscillation: An Altering Rhythm, Counting House, Cork City, 2023. Kate has been supported by Arts Council Agility Awards, a project award, and Cork City Council Artist Bursaries. Kate has an upcoming residency at GlogauAIR, Berlin 2024 and exhibition at the Lab gallery 2025.

Instagram – @kate_mcelroy_
Facebook – Kate McElroy
Twitter- @katemc7

www.katemcelroy.com 

WCAC acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council and Cork County Council in making these residencies possible.