Agriculture and art are combined in Katie’s work
WEXFORD County Council and Wexford Arts Centre are presenting A Calf Remembered, a new exhibition of work by Katie Watchorn, winner of the Emerging Visual Artist Award of 2016
The solo exhibition will be launched in the Arts Centre on Saturday, January 27 at 3pm with a discussion taking place between the artist and Ann Mulrooney, CEO of the Visual Centre for Contemporary Art in Carlow. The show will run until February 24.
Katie Watchorn’s art practice is rooted in the materiality of rural farming. Frequently looking inward at the acreage of her father’s County Carlow dairy farm, she is interested in the presence of livestock and softer somatic substances in a contrastingly harsh farmyard setting.
Through working with materials derived directly from the farmyward, agri-specifric shops, creameries and the animals themselves, she deliberately creates an atmosphere of entering onto private land or place, where the farmer appears to have just departed, giving the viewer unspoken and perhaps congenial access to their homestead.
In her chosen materials, there exists a dialogue surrounding the ideas of permanence and decay. The apparent durability of materials such as metal and concrete distinctly contrast with those which are fleeting and subject to decomposition.
Through this juxtapositioning, Katie reflects a tenuous period in current small farming practice through the fact that these are not lasting objects, rather they will be re-absorbed back into the farm for further use.
Colour in the artist’s work is used to reference agricultural practices and processes and the farmyard itself with instances of coloured concrete aggregate, green woven galebreaker and red iron oxide permeating the works alongside the mammalian substance of rendered beef fat. Through their use, Katie suggests that we have stepped inside not only the dwelling place of a farmer but that of the cow also.
Raised on a dairy farm in rural County Carlow, Katie received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting from the National College of Art and Design in 2014.
In recent years, she has exhibited in Visual, Carlow; TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway; Foundation 14, Offaly; and NCAD Gallery, Dublin.
She won the George Berkeley Gold Medal for Visual Arts at the 2014 Undergraduate Awards, a 2015 Artlinks Bursary Award from Carlow County Council, and the HOTRON Recent Graduate Award 2016 selected by Annie Fletcher. Katie has recently been a recipient of a Next Generation Arts Council Award to produce new work in 2017-18.
The Emerging Visual Artist Award is a joint initiative between the Arts Council, Wexford County Council and Wexford Arts Centre which acknowledges and supports the development of committed visual artists in Ireland, providing funding to produce and exhibit a body of work.