Humanity and Nature: The Porcelain of Kate MacDowell

Is it possible for art to be creepy and cute at the same time? Certainly when you see the porcelain art of Kate MacDowell in to account you are struck by two things. There is an breathtaking beauty in her attention to detail of our animal friends. Yet, many of the animals that she portrays are distinctly dead – already on the slab and undergoing a porcelain necropsy.
When you think about it our relationship with nature goes back way before human history – cave paintings drawn by prehistoric people in what they no doubt did not refer to as their leisure time show our intimacy with the natural world. Tens of thousands of years later MacDowell extends that tradition.
Yet all those many thousands of years ago we hunted and we gathered. We retain a rather idealistic impression of our union with nature in an age when our impact on our environment has never been so great or so harmful. MacDowell’s pieces reflect this dichotomy – we are the ultimate environmental stressor. We pollute, change the climate and introduce GM crops. LINK: kuriositas