Kate Newby

Kate Newby is known for her site-responsive works, which are inserted directly into exhibition spaces, architecture, and surrounding areas. Her handmade, crudely constructed sculptural interventions simultaneously connect and contrast with their environments. Often working in glass and ceramics, she draws out the physical and poetic qualities of materials, highlighting a perceptual awareness that encourages viewers to consider the relationship between people and the environment in which the sculpture exists.

Deliberately situating her practice in the historical framework of land art, Newby takes an urban feminist perspective on this male dominated artistic field. She offers a rebuttal to the male domination by being preoccupied with creating and underlining a much more fluid, fleeting relationship with sites and materials. She often makes works that are designed to collect the debris of the natural space they exist in, to be thrown into the sea, or carried in the pocket of the owner.

Underpinning Newby’s process is a performative ethos: she investigates the way material interventions made in response to a site’s particular temporal, physical and geographical conditions can be a means of transformation and intervention.

Her first outdoor work here in Sarvisalo, Swift little verbs pushing the big nouns around (2017), takes the form of a bronze wind-chime: its sound announces its existence before its visual presence is noted. Made of several lengths of cast bronze tied on natural rope, it blends in subtly with the woodland around it.