Kathryn Maguire

Kathryn Maguire's practice engages text, sculpture, video, and installation; making diverse cultural references linking the past with the contemporary; exploring geology, the history of materials, building materials, and the circular economy. Her practice concentrates on lithics, minerals, mining, and knowing place from the mantle up. Maguire is examining rocks, minerals and fossils in various international locations. Increasingly, her work engages processes of making, informed by her earlier training as a jewellery-maker and sculptor. She attempts to understand the experience of complexities of deep time visible in materials.

She engages questions arising in the Greek Philosophers and an understanding of materials as a means to both artistic production and revealing laws in the Physical World. Using performance as ‘survey/workshop/lab’ a connection between artist and scientist is explored; creating and presenting demonstrative elements in the gallery and the field. Often an expert is involved, a source of knowledge rooted in real scientific phenomena. Attempts to reveal fundamental and invisible forces and energies, explored by scientists and experts alike, are central to Maguire’s practice. New works have used scientific technology to reveal the geomythologies that we inhabit and host.

Kathryn Maguire is a visual artist and educator whose practice incorporates socially engaged projects and environmental awareness projects. She creates sculptural installations and interventions, weaving her visual arts practice with educational facilitation methods, to explore ideas with communities and within the gallery space. Currently, her work is focused on voices of the forgotten and the dead, the silenced and the non-human, exploring how these voices might have agency in memory and history.

To the Mountain is Maguire's first solo show, exploring the mapping of Mountains. The mapping of Ireland was developed to facilitate taxation and know the 'Underground Potential' of geological and material value. The mapping was done by triangulation by creating a series of primary triangles. Sightings were taken between stations using theodolites. This, and the artist's question, 'Do Mountains commune with us?' has inspired the fabrication of the works on show.Many of the works are informed and inspired by Maguire’s research into magnetism, Earth Sciences and measurement, geological phenomena, and experiments in the field. A simple piece of string tied to a rock can determine Specific Gravity. The works on show examine the potential and meaning of the interior Mountain. How can we move away from over-mining and endless extraction of the Earth’s minerals, and move to a circular economy? In the final work, Plateau seeks to offer a stabilising time and respite, turning the gaze back onto the viewer: the Mountain is within, new rocks are being formed and no longer need to be mined.