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21/02/2022 - 12/04/2022

Katie Watchorn’s practice is rooted in the rhythms of farming and land management. Primarily sculptural, she often employs fickle, agriculturally specific materials in combination with familiar rural motifs and ubiquitous objects and forms from her surrounding environs. These re-situated encounters aim to establish a new awareness of a contemporary rather than a vanished existence. Her methodological strategy is grounded in the material transformation of pre-existing agricultural elements by means of reproducing them through mould making and casting methods. This interference attempts to release their associative potential.

Katie’s ongoing explorations often focus on agricultural materials that oscillate on the line between obsolescence and innovation. The resulting sculptures are grounded in a contemporary experiences of rurality, and respond to agriculture in real time. Often, Katie’s work aims to distill the inherently chaotic environments of farming practice and reduce it to its barest outlines, allowing for an abstraction of this otherwise practical environment. In essence, the rurality of her existence is often rendered sterile and ambiguous, a symptom of her own fluctuation from rural to urban environments, and how these landscapes often compete in her mind.

Katie Watchorn

Katie Watchorn graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include; Zero Grazing at Studio Pavilion as part of Glasgow International, 2021, A Calf Remembered, Wexford Arts Centre, BalehomeBalehome at VISUAL Carlow, both 2018. Group exhibitions include: From Here to There, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, GUEST, curated by Marysia Wieckiewicz Carroll, Newbridge House, Dublin, Grass Roots, Muine Bheag, Co. Carlow (all 2021); PAST/URES, The Library Project, Dublin, 2020 and Periodical Review #9, Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2019. She was Overall Winner in the Visual Arts Category of the 2014 Irish Undergraduate Awards, received the HOTRON Recent Graduate Award 2016, selected by Annie Fletcher, and is the recipient of a number of Arts Council Bursaries, including the Next Generation Award (2017) supporting emerging artists of promise at a pivotal stage in their career. Katie was a resident at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2019 as part of their 1000 programme and is currently an artist-in-residence at Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin.

Past Residencies

2023

Landscape, Ecology & Environment Research Residencies