Nature vs Humans: Alarming Porcelain Sculptures by Kate Macdowell

Kate Macdowell’s unique porcelain sculptures show the rifts between man and nature with environmental threats and their consequences. Additionally, the sculptures borrow from art history, myth, figures of speech and cultural touchstones.

Macdowell hand sculpts every piece out of porcelain and often starts with a solid form and then hollows it out. Smaller forms are built branch by branch or petal by petal. She has chosen porcelain for what she feels is its strength, ability to show fine texture, and its ghostly and luminous qualities. 

Based out of Portland, OR, Kate Macdowell’s work has been shown throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. She was recently an artist in residence at the Kohler Arts & Industry Program, was a participant in an artist residency at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine, and will again have entries in group exhibits this year.

Pictures of her sculptures have been published in various journals and periodicals. In addition to being in a multitude of group exhibitions, she has had solo exhibitions in galleries in Seattle, Miami, Sheboygan, and Portland.

Macdowell has worked and lived in various cultures and environments that have ended up influencing the way she perceives the world. She has taught in urban high schools, volunteered in rural India at a meditation retreat center, produced websites in a high-tech corporate environment, and has collected ideas from her travels through Italy, Greece, Thailand, and Nepal.