Katherine Sankey— Hydrozomes: water bodies

About

Opening reception: 6–8pm Thursday 11th November
Register a time for the preview here.
Exhibition continues:  Friday 12th November – Saturday 27th November

Gallery hours
12–6pm, Thursday–Saturday

www.pallasprojects.org

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Pallas Projects/Studios are pleased to present Katherine Sankey—Hydrozomes: water bodies the tenth and final exhibition of our 2020/21 Artist-Initiated Projects programme.
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Katherine Sankey's sculpture uses living plant tissue and human supply lines to engage in the geo-feminist conversation about what we gouge and suck from the planet. Her practice examines mutation and the human extractive machine of supply and power in a multi-species context. Her artworks engage with how we as people adapt and colonize as well as inhabit territories.

Sankey’s sculpture is linear and combines arboreal elements, plumbing, electrics and video. Her practice seeks to challenge assumptions about both the boundaries of the human and what constitutes a ‘natural’ object or environment. In its uncanny representations of embodiment and parasitic invasion of a host space, Sankey’s sculpture holds a grimy, distorted mirror to ‘the real’.

Hydrozomes is a collection of artworks from the last 3 years shown for the first time, or in new configurations. As you enter, Sankey’s sculptural grammar connects the invisible linear apparatus of water and energy conduction surrounding us in our built environments, with the living organisms of wood, lichen and crustacean parts.

​Then there is Hydrozomes, a sprawling installation incorporating ‘studies’ of hybrid mineral bodies as organic architectures. Here we encounter Sankey’s studio practice ‘mid-process’; a rogue hydroponics of sorts, inhabiting the experimental nature of the Artist-Initiated Projects.

'Sankey’s work asks important questions about how we connect to the unseen and to the mechanisms that we take for granted in the small, routine moments of our lives. Her sculpture gestures to the delicate balance of our ecosystems (in the strict sense of the word but also our own personal systems, both constructed and natural). Her practice also alludes to the sometimes awkward or precarious quality of these systems, brought to the fore in the manner that artworks are made, balanced and suspended. (…) I am drawn to the ways that these artworks allude to time, in that their energies and flow are open in terms of direction, again representing a crucial focus on process, rather than on a cohesive beginning or end.' — Julie Morrissy, excerpt from File Note lV, a Fire Station Artists’ Studios publication, 2021.​​​

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Biography

Katherine Sankey was born in Paris, is Australian Irish and is based in Dublin. Her other solo exhibitions include Containment at RUA RED earlier this year and she will show at The Lab next year. Sankey currently has a new site-specific installation in a four-person show ‘Worlds of their Own’ curated by Sharon Murphy at DRAÍOCHT (where she has an AIR  Residency until Jan 2022). This year she also showed in ‘Woman in The Machine’,  VISUAL, Carlow, the RHA Annual and in PALIMPSEST at CHQ. In 2021 Sankey received the DCC Visual Arts Bursary, the Arts Council Bursary and the Arts Council Agility Award. Sankey’s sculpture Desmosome was recently purchased for the Arts Council Collection.

In 2020, Sankey was the recipient of the Fire Station Artists’ Studios Sculpture Award, gave a ‘Plinth Politics’ talk at the RHA and was an invited artist in last year’s RHA Annual  Exhibition. Before that she showed in TULCA – Tactical Magic in 2019, and in CAST in  2018 - an exhibition of 5 sculptors at Luan Gallery, Athlone.

www.katherinesankey.com | Fcb: katherine.sankey.3 | Instagram: katherinesankey_artist
 

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Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of exhibitions taking place in the context of gallery space with a dedicated tradition towards the professional development of artists in a peer-led, supportive environment. This unique programme of funded, artist-initiated projects selected via open call is highly accessible to artists, with a focus on early career, emerging artists and recent graduates. Projects are supplemented with artists' talks, texts, workshops or performances, online events and gallery visits by colleges and local schools.

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Engage with the Artist-Initiated Projects programme online: AIP/Pages is a dedicated Artist-Initiated Projects resource – a newly commissioned series of online, interactive artists pages. These artists' pages will afford a unique space for each artist to inhabit, share texts, research, works in progress, and web-specific works, allowing visitors to discover, engage and interact with these exploratory art practices.

Full Artist-Initiated Projects programme
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Pallas Projects/Studios is funded by The Arts Council