Katrina Cowling
Her intuitive practice spans sculpture, drawing, writing and installation. As a trained neon-bender and maker of light, she has explored the seductive combination of electricity, light, glass, and noble gases for over nine years, playfully disrupting the formal and conceptual tropes of this elusive and dying craft. Her work explores vulnerability, intimacy, and failure; with a focus on materiality, process, and the body in space.
Physicality is central to her processes; the span and limitations of her body dictate the form and scope of the work. As a sculptor, she is committed to the making; an advocate of slowness and craft, she develops relationships with specific materials over long periods of time. Her practice is grounded in care.
Often referencing architecture, modernist design, the human body, and bodies of land, her sculptures and installations negotiate spaces and edges. Rather than any medium in isolation, she is interested in the relationships between objects and materials, and the atmospheres generated through these poetic frictions.
Precarity is evident in all of her restless sculptures: leaning, flailing, teetering, trembling, supporting, always on the brink of collapse. She combines materials from disparate vernaculars; the industrial, the everyday, the natural, the domestic, the rural and the urban to explore ideas of stability and instability, safety and threat, growth and collapse.
