Katie Watchorn
EMERGING VISUAL ARTIST AWARD WINNER 2016-17
Wexford County Council, Wexford Arts Centre & Arts Council of Ireland
Partnership Initiative
Wexford County Council, Wexford Arts Centre and the Arts Council are delighted to announce artist Katie Watchorn as the recipient of the tenth annual Emerging Visual Artist Award. As a joint initiative between the three organisations, the award’s aim is to recognise and support the development of promising and committed visual artists in Ireland. The winner receives €5,000 to supplement and assist in the production of new work for a solo exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre. As the recipient of the award, Watchorn will create a new body of work throughout the period of January- December 2017, to be exhibited in January 2018.
Katie Watchorn works with a diverse range of agrarian materials to create tactile pieces illuminating the nuances and materiality of Irish rural farming. Drawing on her own experiences and upbringing in the farm environ, Watchorn is interested in the presence of livestock in a contrastingly harsh setting. She frequently extracts and re-appropriates the utilitarian materials found on her father’s farm, adjusting their contents and conventional uses to create hybrid and often now obsolete forms.
For her exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre, Watchorn will create a body of work concerned with the placement of these functional rural materials within the formal environment of a public gallery in an attempt to create an ‘atmosphere’ of the farm. With a primary focus on materials, she will combine ‘softer’ somatic substances with rough agri-based raw materials including but not limited to rubber, sheet metals and methods such as powder coating and hot dip galvanising. Owing to her familiarity with the constructs of rural life, sites such as local agri-providers and creameries which are central to the agricultural community will be utilised as launching points. The seemingly improvised yet functional and adaptable nature of materials and equipment on a farm, the kinetic energies of machinery and its transformation of the landscape, and the ritualistic & cyclical life of the farmer will be considered. Through this dialogical body of work, Watchorn will highlight this ongoing process of contemporary and ancestral Irish life and tradition which is often understated, undervalued and overlooked.
For her exhibition at Wexford Arts Centre, Watchorn will create a body of work concerned with the placement of these functional rural materials within the formal environment of a public gallery in an attempt to create an ‘atmosphere’ of the farm. With a primary focus on materials, she will combine ‘softer’ somatic substances with rough agri-based raw materials including but not limited to rubber, sheet metals and methods such as powder coating and hot dip galvanising. Owing to her familiarity with the constructs of rural life, sites such as local agri-providers and creameries which are central to the agricultural community will be utilised as launching points. The seemingly improvised yet functional and adaptable nature of materials and equipment on a farm, the kinetic energies of machinery and its transformation of the landscape, and the ritualistic & cyclical life of the farmer will be considered. Through this dialogical body of work, Watchorn will highlight this ongoing process of contemporary and ancestral Irish life and tradition which is often understated, undervalued and overlooked.
Katie Watchorn received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting from the National College of Art and Design in 2014. In recent years, Watchorn has exhibited in VISUAL, Carlow; TULCA 2014, Galway; Foundation 14, Offaly; and NCAD Gallery, Dublin. She won the George Berkeley Gold Medal for Visual Arts at the 2014 Undergraduate Awards, a 2015 Artlinks Bursary Award from Carlow County Council, and the HOTRON Recent Graduate Award 2016 selected by Annie Fletcher. Katie has recently been a recipient of a Next Generation Arts Council Award for the production of new work in 2017/2018.
For further information on the artist or the Emerging Visual Art Award please contact Catherine Bowe, Visual Arts Manager, Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford on +353 (0)53 9123764 or email catherine@wexfordartscentre.ie.
Top Image:
The Man is Waiting for the Calf, the Calf is Waiting to be born, bees wax, galvinised steel, toy shed, dimensions variable, 2016
For further information on the artist or the Emerging Visual Art Award please contact Catherine Bowe, Visual Arts Manager, Wexford Arts Centre, Cornmarket, Wexford on +353 (0)53 9123764 or email catherine@wexfordartscentre.ie.
Top Image:
The Man is Waiting for the Calf, the Calf is Waiting to be born, bees wax, galvinised steel, toy shed, dimensions variable, 2016
