Cass Fine Art: Lunchbox lecture by Katie McGown News from the School of Art, Architecture and Design

'The Instability of Cloth, a lunchbox lecture by the artist Katie McGown

Date: 16/02/2015

Katie McGown's talk will explore the ways in which textiles are used in sculptural practices to describe multiple kinds of instability; structural, social and temporal. Katie is interested both in how these different modes of flux and collapse can be used within her own art practice, as well as reappraising the frequently stigmatised use of textiles (including cloth, rope, felt and string) in twentieth century sculptural works. The introduction of textiles into fine art practices is often traced back to a feminist, or post-minimalist context of the late 1960s, but this research seeks to lengthen this narrative back in modernism, identifying Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages (1914) as perhaps the first work of 'textile art'.

Katie McGown is an artist and practice-led PhD candidate at Northumbria University. She grew up in Canada and moved to the UK in 2005 to pursue an MFA Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art. She has exhibited widely in the UK and across Europe.