Kate MacDowell
Transformation and Memorial: Ecological Narratives in Porcelain
Interview by Rachel Maly
Kate MacDowell is a ceramic sculptor based in Portland, Oregon. She creates haunting and delicate white porcelain sculptures that concern humanity’s relationship with and impact on the environment. Her imagery merges, art history, mythology, literature, and current environmental issues. She originally obtained a degree in English and came to art later. She has studied at the Art Center in Carrboro, North Carolina and later at Portland Community College's Cascade campus and the Oregon College of Art and Craft's community education program. She earned her Master’s in Teaching English from Brown University.
Kate MacDowell Working on Last of His Tribe
Rachel Maly
What is your process for developing content and imagery?
Kate MacDowell
Most of the time, I'm always working toward a specific exhibit or show. I don't just make work and then look for a show. It's just not really worked out that way because exhibits, even group ones are scheduled so far in advance, and they often have a theme. If it's a solo show, you can determine the theme yourself. I'll have a general idea of what the theme of the show is, or what the gallery is like if it's a group show. Then I'll start thinking about, what am I interested in that could fit with that theme. The main gallery I work with is Mindy Solomon, which is in Miami Florida. The gallery had a show that was all about invasive species in Florida. I'd go online and Google, “What are invasive species in Florida? What are the effects? How did this process start? How is the public reacting?” I'll figure out the context of a show and then I'll think about what animals I like to make. I think about the constraints of the medium and how it might affect what animals I would sculpt.
Rachel Maly
How did you start your current body of work?
Kate MacDowell
Since 2007, I have been doing just mostly white porcelain. I had an idea that needed to involve porcelain and I worked with porcelain for the first time. The piece is these weird plant things that are illuminated from within. It actually shattered when it was dry and I was carrying it into the studio to put in the kiln. I hit a table or something and it fell and broke into dozens of pieces. If you work with porcelain you can actually put things back together again with water and exacto knives, brushes, and stuff like that. I did that with that piece. I kind of became in love with porcelain's qualities, both in what the finished piece looked like, but also working with it. At that point, I just kind of wanted porcelain.
I thought about, what does porcelain mean conceptually and thematically? It's been associated with high status and value in the past. It's very strong in some ways but it's also very fragile. If it's unfinished, it has this white marble like glow that kind of reminds me of ghosts or tomb statues or Roman marble statues. All those qualities were things I thought about. They'll be fragile and delicate, but they'll also be kind of ghostly. They'll also have this kind of monumental look. They look like they're made out of marble. I thought about what kinds of pieces would look good in that material.
Predator, 9"x9"x3 ½", hand built porcelain, cone 6 glaze, 8/2013
Rachel Maly
Would you elaborate on your sculptural process?
Kate MacDowell
I start with fast sketches. Then sometimes, I'll make little mini maquettes to explore that further, especially if I'm worrying about balance and how the finished piece will stand. Then I go online and I do the research. I find the environmental ideas that I want to be exploring. I narrow down the species of animal to the one I'm most interested in. I find lots of images that I have on my laptop, but then I'll also print out a whole bunch and basically cover my entire wall. Then I'll usually work out proportions. I have a bunch of different tricks for getting proportions correct. Sometimes, it’s (the sculpture) built over a ball of newspaper that's wrapped in plastic in the center, just to reduce the weight. Once I get it to a certain level of refinement, I'll cut it open and hollow everything out to 1/4 inch. I'll create lots of little components and I'll put them in the wet box until they're ready to add on.
I do a lot of patching because there's always hairline cracks. Mostly, I use Golden Modeling Paste. Golden is an acrylic medium and acrylic paint company. They have a couple of different modeling pastes which just happened to be the exact same color as the fired porcelain that I use. Some cracks can be hidden pretty easily.
(A wet box is a plastic container with a wet piece of plaster at the bottom designed to keep clay moist.)
Rachel Maly
How have your travels in India and Europe influenced your work and the mythology you incorporate?
Kate MacDowell
That was a long time ago, but they definitely did. Especially, when I first started working with porcelain. I think the main thing is I'd always been very interested in visual arts. In my last two years of high school, I've gone to a visual arts Career Center. My family didn't encourage me to go in that direction and I went to a regular liberal arts college. I got a degree in teaching and English. Once I'd gone to India and Rome and seen how what we would consider visual arts treasures like statues of gods or biblical figures were just part of everyone's everyday life, and they served kind of a social function as well as a spiritual function. In India, there can be shrines in every street corner and as people would walk by to work, they would have a prayer or an offering there. It was something that you did as part of the fabric of the community.
I saw artwork as being functional, but not in the way we usually think of functional as plates and cups or whatever. Art is functional because it serves a role in society. I don't really see that much in the United States, except in maybe media like film. People interact with 3D artwork and sculpture all the time in India, Italy, and Europe. Seeing this made me think that being an artist maybe isn't an entirely selfish thing to do, but it serves a social function even if you are making things that are narrative sculptures and not plates and cups.
Rachel Maly
Are there individual myths or mythologies that you draw the most influence from?
Kate MacDowell
I think early on it was definitely heavily influenced by Greek and Roman myth. That again is from traveling there and also from having a background in English literature. English literature is heavily influenced by Greek and Roman classics. It's the whole Western Canon thing, but (in) a lot of the transformations that I use, I see in Greek and Roman myth or pieces of art. I use that whole idea from Greek and Roman mythology of people turning into stags or trees. If I want to illustrate something, I will take a psychological, spiritual, or thematic connection, and I'll make it into a logical, literal, physical transformation, where part of the body is human and part is plant or animal. I'm just linking the two things that way so it could be the link of a metaphor or the link of figurative language, but I'm just making it a visual thing.
Rachel Maly
What specific case studies or readings first brought you to environmental issues?
Kate MacDowell
I was always as a small child really interested in observing animals and plants. I never had dolls. I had stuffed animals. My family is all left wing and has been involved in various ways with environmental issues. My dad worked for an organization that worked to abate climate change. My sister works on Amazon conservation. My uncle worked for the EPA. The general issues of environmental protection were just part of my life.
I was first reading about specific species that were (endangered). I think I was going to do something that involved birds, I would look up birds that were endangered or birds in specific geographical areas that had recently been heavily impacted by changes. I read scientific articles about them until I found a story that was interesting for me.
In one of the first ones, I was thinking about species extinction. I researched what species have become extinct because of human intervention. I remember seeing a dead bird. As it decayed, its ribs were being exposed and I thought that was kind of beautiful. That's when I first made a piece that had a human skull and ribcage inside an animal body. I always think of these (narratives inspired by research) as the spark that sort of keeps me going. That's kind of my pilot light that keeps me going through all the boring, tedious, and fragile parts of actually making the piece. Whether the viewer at the end of it actually knows that story, isn't that important to me. It's more for myself and for artist statements and things like that. It's important to me that it has that kind of meaning, but I'm very comfortable with viewers bringing their own meaning. Once I've created an object, that object has its own life in the world.
Rachel Maly
How has your background in English literature influenced the content of your work or how you work?
Kate MacDowell
The earliest pieces that I made specifically came from poems that I was interested in. There were figurative and symbolic language in poems, metaphors, and similes, figures of speech, and I was just interested in translating that into 3 dimensions. The very first piece I made, actually had text on it. I transitioned from that being symbols and words to symbols and metaphors in pure visuals. It's telling stories through realism in the same way that writing would.
Assisted living 1 & 2, 13"x11 ½"x7" & 14"x12"x7 ½", handbuilt porcelain, cone 6 glaze, 11/2011 & 1/2012
Rachel Maly
Some of your pieces, such as Feral, and Jurassic Invader are animals with human limbs, what was your inspiration for that set of imagery?
Kate MacDowell
The reason I used human hands in a lot of my work. Is kind of really dark because it's often, inspired by species extinction and global warming. I initially did want to make a more upbeat piece. I made a piece about California Condors and it was called, Assisted Living. That's the first time I gave them human hands. The California Condors are holding eggs with human hands and that's because that is one species that has really been brought back by hands-on human intervention. It was, scientists wearing puppets on their hands of California Condor heads and picking eggs from the nests and raising them in protected areas, but then also teaching the young birds how to be birds. I was thinking about how direct human intervention is protecting and caring for these eggs.
In my pieces, Feral, and Jurassic Invader, I was thinking of invasive species that are directly carried into a new environment by people, so they're kind of an extension of our own hand in a way. What they're doing is a direct result us bringing them where they shouldn't be. I wanted to make an iguana and a feral cat. I read about feral cats and what their impacts were on some of the native and the endangered species in the areas and how they kind of colonized the Everglades with the first ships that landed. I was reading about all the news stories about freezes and iguanas falling out of the trees and people finding them on the sidewalk. I also read about them chewing through power cables, and chewing up hibiscus trees, and a lot of people’s decorative hedges, and also doing a lot of damage to sea walls by burrowing through them. Often when I use human hands, I'm talking about a very close connection with people putting them into that situation there.
Jurassic invader, 19"x19"x7 ½", hand build porcelain and glaze, 5/2019
Feral 19"x11"x8", hand build porcelain and glaze, 5/2019
The god of change, 12“x10 ½ “x2“, hand built porcelain, cone 6 glaze, 1/2011
Rachel Maly
Would you please elaborate on the piece, The God of Change?
Kate MacDowell
One of the case studies that I came across was about frogs with deformities. They would grow extra limbs or be missing limbs. It was a result of pesticide runoff in streams. I don't remember the name of it, but it's a bacteria or something that would infect them, but it was caused or exacerbated by this pesticide runoff. They were finding these frogs with multiple limbs in these sort of polluted streams. I saw some scientific photos that I thought were really interesting.
In The God of Change, I was thinking about Shiva, the god of change. Shiva is a multi-armed god and is associated with the cycle of destruction and rebirth. I was making that connection to Shiva, because things are changing, there's destruction and rebirth and what effects frogs may eventually affect us because of the way pesticides, travel through bodies of animals and people. The reason that amphibians and frogs are often the first bellwethers of pesticide damage or environmental damage, is because their skin is porous to water, and so their membranes basically let in toxins more easily. That's the same as babies in utero.
Skin-changer's closet, wall-installation, size varies. Grouping forms a rectangle roughly 3 ½'x2 ¼', hand built porcelain, glaze, 2/2015
Rachel Maly
Would you elaborate on the piece, The Skin Changer's Closet?
Kate MacDowell
I am from a Scottish background, so I was thinking about selkies. I was thinking about Celtic and British myths that have to do with people who change skins. People put on a seal skin and become a selkie. We also often imagine ourselves in a very close relationship with nature. There's this very romantic idea of connection with nature that's undermined by what we actually do to nature. The transcendentalists talked about being in nature, being a spiritual experience in which you, yourself, kind of dissolve.
When I was making Skin Changers Closet, I was thinking about how imagine ourselves in the body of various animals. You watch a bird and you think about being a bird and what's that like? These are all the skins of animals that a particular person could wear. The animals might be symbolic of different states the person is in emotionally, whether they're feeling strong or weak, expansive or contracted. These are all suits you could wear. What if one of the skins was an earthworm? Sometimes you feel like an alligator or sometimes you feel like a bat. That whole piece, I sold to one collector and he was like, “Make sure to include the earthworm.” and I'm like, “Yes, that's the most important part of it.”
Rachel Maly
You use the term, Solastalgia in a lot of your work, would you please elaborate on that?
Kate MacDowell
This was the word that was coined by an Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht. He studies ecopsychology or the psychological impacts of environmental damage. The word Solastalgia is something he came up with that's kind of like nostalgia, where you're missing something that's gone, but what you're actually missing is your environment in your home. You may still be living there but it's changing around you. He talked about communities in Australia that were experiencing strip mining. People are going through these mental illnesses based on what is happening to their environment and based on how that's impacting them psychologically. He was talking about how we really cannot discount the role of the environment in mental as well as physical health.
Rachel Maly
How do you store and ship your most delicate and detailed pieces?
Kate MacDowell
I don't send very fragile stuff by ground UPS or FedEx. If it's smaller fragile pieces and I’m just sending one or two, I try to send them by FedEx Air even though it's expensive. I haven't had any breakage that way. I send them by air or I send the bigger pieces with layers of foam with a cut out around them. What I learned to do with a piece, is to put soft polyfill, like pillow stuffing, whenever there's a vacuum in a piece. You can put that polyfill around it if it's really delicate. If it's a little less delicate, you can put tissue paper packed and tight around it, because if there's any chance for the piece to vibrate against itself in air, then it can break. Even if it's completely surrounded by foam but you have fingers with leaves on them and there's, air around them, they will break just vibrating by themselves unless you have polyfill fluff or tissue paper, something like that absorbing all that shock around them.
With all my pieces, I send very detailed unpacking and packing instructions with photos of the different stages. With a lot of pieces, it can be as simple as just packing tissue paper in tight around delicate arms or ears or whatever. Then, I do layers of bubble wrap, soft foam and then double box them. I'll have them strapped down to a wooden pallet. That they then get shrink wrapped onto (the palette) so then that palette is moved by a forklift. Sometimes, I spend as much time on the packing part as planning out the piece, unfortunately.
Rachel Maly
What is your favorite response from viewers?
Kate MacDowell
I like the best when they make up their own story about a piece of artwork. This one person said, the tree is broken, but it's still reaching toward the air. I made a very little piece, a pomegranate that inside it had pills. I was thinking about the Persephone and Hades myth, and basically mind altering drugs and sort of going down into the underworld. It was bought by a woman whose work involved birth control and sexual rights. So she saw the pomegranate as a symbol of fertility. She was thinking about birth control pills. She had this whole other explanation of it.
Rachel Maly
How have you gone about finding collectors for your work?
Kate MacDowell
Pretty early on, when I started making stuff out of porcelain I had put up my own website and I didn't have that many pieces, but I had a few pieces and some of them kind of went viral briefly online and got picked up by an Etsy blog and then some design blogs. The main gallery I now work with in the US, (Mindy Solomon Gallery), approached me and asked if I wanted to have some stuff in a group show. After that, they asked if I wanted to do some solo shows.
One hundred percent of the time now, all my sales are through galleries. I don't sell stuff out of my studio. I know there are a lot of artists who don't work with galleries nowadays. I work so slowly, the gallerist has been really invaluable for finding the collectors. I don't have to worry about checks bouncing or anything like that cause it's all on her end.
The gallerist is often a partner in the creative process. I'll often talk to my gallerist about ideas for a show and just see her takes on them. Sometimes when you have an installation, it's very much determined by the shape of the space. So I give the gallerists the freedom to set them up however you [sic] want.
Rachel Maly
Could you discuss your thoughts behind the piece, Romulus and Remus?
Kate MacDowell
I'd seen that statue in Rome, and I've seen other statues that were done by people in the 18th century who'd seen the original. The whole idea of it is that the wilderness is the mother of civilization. The greatest empire on Earth, the Roman Empire, you know, started with these babies that were fed by the land. I wanted to turn that (around). I thought the real relationship between empire and city and the natural world is much more predatory. I had the wolf being starving and the cubby babies basically sucking all the nutrients out of the wolf. It's a little smaller than life-size.
Romulus and Remus, 18 ½"x12"x7", handbuilt porcelain, cone 6 glaze, 11/2009
Rachel Maly
Do you have a favorite piece that you've made?
Kate MacDowell
Probably the pieces that I've most enjoyed are called, This Patch of Ground. Portland, where I live, actually has a city park that's 2 feet square, so I was thinking about that. What if we valued the micro-environment as much as we value the macro-environment? What if I made these little monuments with weeds, and things like that. I photographed little 6-inch patches of ground, like the weeds in front of my sidewalk. Then I try to recreate that 6-inch thing in three dimensions with all the detail involved, like every blade of grass and every acorn shell and everything that I found. That's probably my favorite way to sculpt is little tiny things like that. You really lose yourself and get immersed as the observer. It's sort of like doing very detailed sketches, but it's 3 dimensional. That was probably the one I most enjoyed.
The piece I'm kind of most proud of how it turned out, is a piece called, Daphne, which is essentially, taking Bernini's statue of Daphne Pursued by Apollo and cutting it up like it was a clear-cut tree. I really like that because of how it connected to the myth of Daphne and Apollo, how it connected to the Bernini sculpture. My thinking behind it was about clear-cutting because there's a lot of clear-cutting in the Pacific Northwest. What’s generally left over the after the clear cut is the stump and a slash pile. I thought, “Oh my gosh this is saying stuff about violence against women too,” because she had transformed to a tree to escape rape. There's a certain amount of violence being done to the tree. So I was thinking about ecofeminism a little bit. I just like that piece because I felt like it went in a lot of different thematic directions, but also, visually, it was interesting.
This patch of ground: 5 ½"x5 ½"x1 ½-2 ½", each, hand built porcelain, 5/2019
Daphne, 53”x17”x40”, hand built porcelain, 12/2007
Clay pigeons, size variable, installation/photographs, slip cast and hand carved terracotta, lead shot, fired to cone 04, 8/2010
Clay pigeons, size variable, installation/photographs, slip cast and hand carved terracotta, lead shot, fired to cone 04, 8/2010
Rachel Maly
You did these clay pigeons a number of years ago. There was a photograph of them being thrown up in the air and shot. What was that like to create?
Kate MacDowell
I've made a couple of installations with slip cast pieces, but that was definitely the first. Passenger pigeons used to be the most common bird in North America in the 1800s. About 40% of all birds in North America were passenger pigeons. Pigeon pie fed poor people in the cities and the slaves and indentured servants. It was probably the easiest protein source to gather. Passenger pigeons only traveled and reproduced in huge masses, and when they would come into an area, you could basically throw stones in the air and kill them or like cover trees with lime that they would just stick to when they landed. There were pigeon culls when they would come through, where they would kill tens of thousands of pigeons in a day. Once these huge flocks diminished, for whatever reason, the birds didn't keep reproducing. The species was only able to keep going in those mass numbers. The last birds were in a zoo and wouldn't breed with each other because they were no longer in those communities that worked for them.
I thought about clay pigeons used in target shooting. I slipcast those pigeons and I actually had a lot of interns help me with assembling them. I'd make slipcasts with various different heads. I think the bodies were all consistent, but various different tail positions, various different wing positions. I tried to make each bird unique. I think there were 45 birds.
We went to an actual bird sanctuary to photograph them (the clay pigeons). They had a hunting club in it and we strung them up with like fishing line and shot them to get those photographs. I had the photographs that went with it and some of the photographs were outdoors before they were shot and they were kind of just staged to be back in the natural environment and the bird sanctuary. Then some were the fragments being displayed. Yeah, that whole project was pretty interesting and I've done one or two other projects like that with different animals.
Rachel Maly
What other animals did you do?
Kate MacDowell
I did frogs or toads. There was a case study about the golden toad from Costa Rica. They were these bright orange golden toads that lived in the Costa Rican cloud forests and they would basically gather once a year to mate in again, like the passenger pigeons. So they'd look like these little orange jewels all over the dark forest, all gathering together. I think that was climate change the home that they lived in dried up their place in the mountain a combination of that plus the chytrid fungus. This fungus affects frogs and has caused a lot of near frog and toad extinctions.
What I wanted to illustrate is these toads gathered every year in these locations. Researchers would go back and count them every year. They noticed 1,000 toads becoming 300 toads, becoming 20 toads, becoming two over a period of a decade. I wanted to illustrate that loss. Some of the toads I made black. Those were the missing toads. Some of them I kept orange. They were the male toads looking for their mate and not finding them among the herd of ghosts. I think I called that, The Last of His Tribe.
Last of his tribe, assemblage of ~150 toads. Assembled size varies (individual toads have 2" long bodies), approximately 8' x 8' as a group, slip-cast and hand-built vitreous china, stain, cone 10 glaze, and oil paint, 9/2012
Last of his tribe, assemblage of ~150 toads. Assembled size varies (individual toads have 2" long bodies), approximately 8' x 8' as a group, slip-cast and hand-built vitreous china, stain, cone 10 glaze, and oil paint, 9/2012
Rachel Maly
What have you been working on recently?
Kate MacDowell
There's a piece I've been working on for years that is just taking forever to hollow out, which is all these fur animals in a huge pile together. The fur is all conjoined, so instead of being one animal. There is a beaver that's melting into a fox, etc. That's a transformation that just involves animals. It erases the distinctions between individual animals.
A couple of years ago, I did a residency on the Oregon Coast. Before I went there, I wanted to research what are some of the Oregon coastal animals and how have they changed overtime? Some of the things I found out were about the impacts of the fur trade and especially on sea otters and beavers. I read about the history of the fur trade in in Oregon and Washington. That's the corner of the world I live in. I thought of, well, what do I want to do with the animals to help tell this story of the fur trade and how animals became commodities and, you know, went through these crazy boom-and-bust cycles that led to their near extinction.
Trappers were trapping beavers and selling them to Europe for people to use for their hats. They wouldn't just trap the beavers, they'd kill every single beaver that they saw because they didn't want competition from other trappers coming behind them. They gather all the animals they could, but even the ones that weren't good for fur ‘cause they were too young or too old or whatever. They would kill them too. It's amazing we have beavers today.
Rachel Maly
Do you have any future projects in mind?
Kate MacDowell
Well, I'm having a solo show next year, so I'm the very earliest stages of starting to think about that, but I would really like to do. I've had an idea for a very long time about creating an enclosed room where there's vegetative trees or plants growing out of the walls and maybe birds and monkeys and things like that. I'm thinking about plant life on walls and I know a lot of other artists who do that, so I don't want to follow in their footsteps. I'm trying to think of how I could put my own spin on it and create installations.
In progress piece, started in 2018
To see more of Kate MacDowell's work, go to: https://www.katemacdowell.com
Rachel Ariel Lewis Maly is a sculptor and writer from Erie, Pennsylvania. She is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in Sculpture at Edinboro University, in Edinboro Pennsylvania. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in Sculpture, with Minors in Art History, Jewelry/Metalsmithing, and Ceramics at Edinboro University. Rachel was awarded a graduate assistantship by the art department of Edinboro University. She has displayed work in a number of exhibitions in Edinboro University’s Bates Gallery. In 2019, Rachel was commissioned through a university grant to create a public art bench as part of Edinboro’s Art 100 celebration. Her two cast concrete benches, Giant Chicken Foot Thrones, were installed in 2023 at Edinboro University’s campus and at Wainer Park in Edinboro Pennsylvania. Her work and short stories were featured in Edinboro University’s Chimera XVI and XVII exhibitions and were published in the Chimera XVI and XVII Journals.