Beauty and Ecological Grief: Kate MacDowell’s Haunting Porcelain Sculptures

Art of the Week from the Alliance for Sustainability

Sculptor Kate MacDowell on parakeets in her piece Feather trade: “The use of fur, feathers, and hide in fashion is in part an extension of prehistoric attempts to clothe and adorn ourselves in order to take on aspects of admired animals. The founding of one of the earliest conservation organizations, the Audubon society, was part of a movement which responded to the contemporary fashion for plumes (and occasionally entire dead birds) on hats. This heavily impacted bird species including the Carolina parakeet that went extinct in 1918 in part due to the demand for their plumage.” Credit: Mindy Solomon Gallery

By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr

We claim to love nature but we are destroying it. In celebration of Women’s History Month, we’re featuring Portland-based artist Kate MacDowell, who takes us to task as she “constructs discomfiting combinations of human and wildlife elements in her porcelain sculptures,” according to Colossal.

On first glance, I was comforted by the delicate beauty of two parakeets nuzzling each other in her Feather trade: Carolina parakeets Duo 3 (2016). But much more is going on than meets the eye. I soon noticed the birds have delicate human hands rather than claws.

I was amazed but also had a bit of an icky feeling. I needed to learn more about the piece and discovered that MacDowell had a much deeper, more troubling message. Her works “can be equal parts amusing and disturbing as the anatomical forms of humans and animals become inexplicably intertwined,” continues Colossal.

For me, MacDowell explains it beautifully when she says, “Our desire or longing for a psychological union between man and nature is complicated by friction and the discomforting feeling that we, too, are vulnerable to being victimized by our destructive practices.”

Plants and animals are suffering from climate change, but we as humans are hurt by our own actions as well. Part of that impact is a deep sense of mourning and loss for people as well as the non-human living world.

I feel both awe and sorrow looking at the extinct-by-humans parakeets above. MacDowell contextualizes the joy and sadness:

“Probably the scientist whose work most struck a chord with me as to the psychological content of my pieces is the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht. I create pieces which explore my own feelings of solastalgia.

“This word, which he coined, describes the palpable sense of dislocation and loss that people feel when they perceive changes to their local environment as harmful — it’s a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change.”

The stark porcelain pieces feel both cold and lively, as MacDowell explains her choice of medium:

“I chose porcelain for its luminous and ghostly qualities as well as its strength and ability to show fine texture. It highlights both the impermanence and fragility of natural forms in a dying ecosystem, while paradoxically, being a material that can last for thousands of years and is historically associated with high status and value,” she tells Colossal.

Long after we are gone, will our lasting legacy to the planet be our stark structures or will we wake up and realign ourselves with nature?

MacDowell explains some of the sculptures from her show Fight and Flight: “I created a series of chimeras that combine specific predatory raptor species with their prey. I was thinking about the delicate balance between a successful hunt and a successful escape that must be achieved in order to survive. These creatures are physically adapting, perhaps transforming due to a changing environment, and negotiating new abilities and power relationships, but they are also being pulled in two directions. Do they belong to the sky or the earth?”

Kate MacDowell’s hand-built porcelain sculptures respond to environmental threats and their consequences, revealing the rifts and frictions between man and nature. She builds each piece by hand, and often layers in details after hollowing out the main form.

Her work has been shown throughout the US and Europe at Scope Miami and New York, Seattle Art Fair, ArtAmsterdam, London Art Fair, Showoff Paris, NEXT and Art Chicago fairs.

MacDowell is an extraordinary example of why the artist’s eye, reflection and expression is so essential to creating a world of sustainability. We desperately need to step back from our busy destruction of the planet to see the gift we have been given and start to protect it.

ED: Please note how this article complements last week’s article on awe and trauma. We are experiencing deep traumatic solastalgia and MacDowell is trying to awaken us before it’s too late.