KATHERINE SANKEY
Irish Australian born in Paris, lives and works in Dublin
PET detail, Luan Gallery, Athlone, Ireland 2018, private collection. Photo: John Owens
Contact: kmsankey@gmail.com
Katherine Sankey is an Australian Irish artist born in Paris and is based in Dublin. She employs sculpture, video, drawing and painting in her installations. Her sculpture uses living plant tissue and human supply lines to engage in the geo-feminist conversation about what we gouge and suck out of the planet. It examines mutation and the human extractive machine of supply and power in a multi species context. Whilst investigating adaptation, colonization and power, Sankey’s art works also explore structure, supply, and degradation; asking questions about nature, the natural, the body, and function. Abstract, cerebral, visceral and immediate, her art practice expresses both stagnation and catharsis.
She uses natural and human-made media – whittled tree-trunks, polished and re-used plumbing pipes, discarded medical and electrical components, porcelain. Her sculpture is sprawling and minutely-detailed. She works with waste materials and detritus to produce unique creations, technically finessed termite mounds of piping, wood and minerals; supply systems that begin underground and replicate in unforeseen patterns, parasitically invading the host space.
Sankey’s current projects seek to challenge assumptions about both the boundaries of the human what constitutes a ‘natural’ object. They hold a grimy, distorted mirror to ‘the real’. In its uncanny representations of embodied experience, it is about dis-ease, disturbance, anxiety, illness and repair.
See: Pallas P/S AIP Pages https://aip.pallasprojects.org/pages/katherine-sankey
KATHERINE SANKEY CV
born in Paris, Irish Australian, lives in Dublin
Solo Exhibitions (and duo)
2024 STAC, Clonmel Sth Tipperary Arts Centre, Ireland, with Anna Macleod, 8 Sept –19 Oct (Curated by Helena Tobín)
2023 EarthLab: living matters RHA Gallery Dublin, Ireland, ,
an atom bomb in each morsel of life, The LAB Gallery Dublin, Ireland,
SANKEY | WALKER, The DOCK Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland (collaboration Corban Walker)
2021 HYDROZOMES | waterbodies, PALLAS Projects Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
2020/21 Containment: Chthonic Parts II & III, RUA RED, Tallaght, Dublin, Ireland
2014 Organelle (studio show), Distillery Court, Dublin, Ireland
2007 Zones of Proximity, The SHED, Foley St, Dublin, Ireland
1993 BREATH, Galeria Pryzmat, Krakow, Poland
Beginning Backwards, Chopin Museum Gallery, Grodkow, Poland
Everyday Gravities, install-action, Galeria Impart, BWA, Wroclaw, Poland
Corrosion of Sense, install-action at Galeria Entropia, Wroclaw, Poland
What Matters What Margins? Install-action at Galeria X, Wroclaw, Poland
Brododactylos, Galeria Labyrynt 2, BWA Lublin, Poland
1992 Mephisto’s Epilogue live performance, Lublin Television, Poland
Further Forth - Firth of Forth, Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland
1990 Polar-switch, Rondeau Gallery, Sydney, Australia
1989 Another Axis, Pan Sydney ’89, W.I.N.D.O.W. Gallery, Sydney, Australia
Group Exhibitions
2024 DISTINCT, Disability Art Festival, The Project Art Centre Gallery, Dublin, March 7 – April 20
(curated by AlanJames Burns)
Invited Artist, 194th RHA Annual Exhibition, April - July
2023 Maslow’s Hammer, Periodic Review, PALLAS P/S, Dublin, Ireland - until 27 Jan 2024
2021 Woman in the Machine, VISUAL, Carlow
PALIMPSEST with @5lampsarts, CHQ, IFSC, Dublin
PLATFORM 21, ‘Worlds of Their Own’, Draíocht Gallery, Blanchardstown
191st RHA Annual Exhibition, Dublin
2020 Invited Artist, 190th RHA Annual Exhibition, Dublin
ROOT Exhibition, Leitrim Organic Centre, Online
Kunsthal Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition, Copenhagen, Denmark
2019 RUA RED Winter Open, , Tallaght, Ireland
Tactical Magic, TULCA Festival of Visual Art, Galway, Ireland
RHA Annual Exhibition, Dublin, Ireland
2018 CAST, Luan Gallery, Athlone, Ireland
2008-09 Sculpture in Context, National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland
RHA Annual Exhibition, Dublin, Ireland
Ni Hao-Dia Duit, Cross-cultural Project by Jay KOE, IMMA Studios, Dublin, Ireland
2006 Initiation of Moore Street Lending Library Project with Fire Station Artist Studios, Moore Street Dublin.
2005 Latitude Longitude Season, Catalyst Arts Gallery, Belfast, Ireland
2002 Crossings, Australian Aboriginal & European Artist Exchange, COLLECTIF 12, Maningrida, Northern Territory, Australia
2001 Crossings, COLLECTIF 12, Paris, France
1997 Downside Collection Exhibition, Julian Barran Gallery Ltd, London, England
@re we close?, Galerie Artsenal, Paris, France
1993 Bloomsday, La Centre Culturel Irlandaise, Paris, France
Lingua Franca Sculpture Symposium, BWA Galleries, Wroclaw and Czestochowa, Poland
1992 The Unofficial Supplement to Bruno Schulz, The University of Katowice, Cieszyn, Poland
M.o.M.I.A., Jerzy Grotowski Centre, Wroclaw, Poland
Pentagonale Plus, Exhibition of New European Art, Knights Park Gallery, Richard Demarco, London, England
1990 Aerial Art - Cathedral of the Industrial Trapeze, The Foundry Galleries, Sydney, Australia
Seriously Fruit Exhibition, Rondeau Gallery, Sydney, Australia
1989 White-Wash Show, Rondeau Gallery, Sydney, Australia
The Production of Optical Equivalences, Exhibition of Australian Satirical Art, EMR Gallery, Sydney, Australia
Bursaries/Awards
2022 Arts Council of Ireland Visual Art Bursary Round 2
2021 Arts Council of Ireland Visual Art Bursary Round 1
Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award round 1
2020 Fire Station Artists’ Studios Sculpture Award Bursary
Dublin City Council Arts Bursary
2019 RUA RED Winter Open - Solo Exhibition Award for 2020/21
2002 Travel Bursary – Arts Council of Ireland
Lectures/ Residencies
2024 STAC Chapel Residency, South Tipperary Arts Centre
2022 Culture Night, Lecture, Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin, Ireland
2021 National College of Art and Design, Lecture, Dublin, Ireland
Fingal County Council Draíocht AIR Residency, Fingal County Council, Ireland
2020 Royal Hibernian Academy ‘Plinth Politics’ Lecture, Dublin, Ireland
2004/5 Larkin Community College Residency, Dublin, Ireland
1993/4 Downside Abbey School Residency, Bath, England
1992/3 Galleria ‘X’ Residency, Wroclaw, Poland
1992 BWA Galleries Exhibitions Bursary, Poland
1992 Richard Demarco Gallery Residency, Edinburgh, Scotland
Education
1994-7 DEA Art & Literary Theory, Hélène CIXOUS, Université Paris VIII, France
1990-1 PG Dip. Theatre Design, Trent University, Nottingham, England
1986-9 BA Visual Art, Sydney College of the Arts, Australia
Public Collections:
State Collection, Office of Public Works, Dublin Castle
Arts Council of Ireland Collection
Exhibition Essay for:
an atom bomb in each morsel of life
The Lab Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, runs until - 5th September 2023
’55–’63
Nathan O’Donnell
In her 2017 book, The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard sets out to articulate ‘a way of speaking which implicates your body in everything on earth’.[1]
The book begins by problematising the distinctions we make between our bodies and the worlds around us: the animal world, the machine world, the world of microplastic and waste we have generated. Hildyard is critical of any idea of the self as a contained entity, of the body as a defined boundary. On the contrary, her aim is to find a language to express the interconnectedness – the entanglement – of the human and the non-human.
In normal life, a human body is rarely understood to exist outside its own skin – it is supposed to be inviolable. The language of the human animal is that of a whole and single individual. … Climate change creates a new language, in which you have to be all over the place; you are always all over the place. It makes every animal body implicated in the whole world.[2]
Hildyard refuses to think of the body as a stable container with rigid demarcations. Instead, she proposes that we consider the possibility that we are possessed of a ‘second body’, an expanded, borderless entity, extending across the globe and into the earth, into water, into the air, through infrastructural and political and ecological systems. This second body allows us to conceive of the multiple – infinite – extensions and interpenetrations of the individual with the world.
Katherine Sankey’s work is full of entanglement. Her sinuously-assembled, sometimes-monstrous sculptural objects are interlocked, plumbed, entwined, looped together. They have a complex internal circuitry that also extends outward, connecting, at certain key points, to the gallery infrastructures around them.
At these circuit points, they seem uncontainable, as if they refuse to be considered separate, inviolate, distinct from the world around them.
The ‘bomb pulse’ is the name given to the spike in atmospheric Carbon-14 produced by the hundreds of nuclear bomb tests that were undertaken in the post-war period. Beginning in 1945 but intensifying a decade later – and continuing until 1963, when they were banned by international treaty – more than five hundred nuclear bombs were exploded, above ground, in the open air, around the world, creating an atomic pulse that effectively left a time signature in every living thing on earth. Even animals at the bottom of the ocean – deep-sea creatures dwelling in the Mariana Trench – show traces of Carbon-14 in their muscles. This was a historically-specific event, taking place across a brief few year(s) of concentrated intensity, but it is also continuing to play out in slow motion. The full extent of its effects remains to be seen. What is clear is that this radioactive fallout has left an atomic date stamp on every part of life on this planet, as indelible as the carbon rings of a tree trunk.
Particle physicist and philosopher Karen Barad argues that ‘matter fell from grace during the twentieth century’.[3] We can no longer separate the material from the immaterial. We no longer have access to the idea of some fixed human scale through which to view the world: large and small interpenetrate, become impossible to differentiate. Temporalities are mutable. The earth is now a sort of test-site, an experimental environment over which we have lost control (if we ever had it), an unstable atmosphere in which outcomes cannot be predicted.
*
In Earth, we see a pair of hands, digging in a patch of earth. It is a repetitive quotidian gesture, familiar to anyone who gardens; the grounding interaction of skin and earth, the simple inquisitive act of uprooting a bit of soil in a backyard. This footage is juxtaposed, on a second screen, by a cascade of images of other, more colossal excavations. Bomb craters. Open cast mines. Building sites. The hole in the earth left after a tree has been uprooted.
Sankey talks to me about taking a walk in a park near her home, where the Council were removing dislodged trees. She talks about getting up close to the disrupted tangle of roots and earth and microcosmic life, insects, soil, a whole complex ecosystem, and being struck by a sense of terror, brought face to face with a world-within-our-world that is strange and monstrous to us, an entanglement of species and matter, a knot of ecological wiring which is inscrutable to us and without which we could not survive.
*
The Manhattan Project not only unlocked the power of the atom, creating new industries and military machines, it also inaugurated a subtle but total transformation of the biosphere … we need to examine the effects of the bomb not only at the level of the nation-state but also at the level of the local ecosystem, the organism, and ultimately, the cell. … America’s nuclear project has witnessed the transformation of human ‘nature’ at the level of both biology and culture … turning the earth into a vast laboratory of nuclear effects that maintain an unpredictable claim on a deep future.[4]
*
Sankey’s work modulates between different scales, sometimes expansively large, sometimes granular and forensic. The question of scale is a key preoccupation for the artist. It is one of the key collective challenges we face, as we struggle to imaginatively conceive of the Anthropocene, climate destruction, and the entanglement of matter and body. These are concepts that combine an almost astral metaphysical quality with raw political and social urgency.[5] They require thinking across several scales simultaneously and immediately – the human, the global, the cosmic, the subatomic.
This is more than an imaginative exercise. As Barad notes, ‘[w]hen the splitting of an atom, or more precisely, its tiny nucleus (a mere 10−15 meters in size, or one hundred thousand times smaller than the atom), destroys cities and remakes the geopolitical field on a global scale, how can anything like an ontological commitment to a line in the sand between “micro” and “macro” continue to hold sway on our political imaginaries?’[6]
This folding of micro and macro is a feature of Sankey’s practice. Her sculptural work is rarely scaled to the (average, Modular, Vetruvian) human body. Occasionally the body might figure as a tangential affordance – she sometimes incorporates pieces of furniture, for instance, a table, a kitchen chair, with their suggestions of a human occupant or user. Or the body might feature as a reference or index; Breather, for instance, suggests to me the body of a supine giant. But otherwise, it seems to me, her lens is not focused on the human; instead it ranges back and forth between the molecular and the monstrous.
On my last visit to the artist’s studio, Breather is laid out on the ground, covered over in a sheet of tarpaulin. It has returned from another show and is ready to be transported on to the Lab. It looks like a huge dead body wrapped in an enormous body bag.
*
It is not only at the level of the particle that entanglement has come to be recognised. Even in the past decade, there have been significant developments in our understanding of the entanglements of natural ecosystems: forest root systems, mycelial networks. As has been recently observed, James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulis’s famous ‘Gaia hypothesis’ – the case for viewing the earth as a living, self-regulating organism, much-derided within the scientific community when it was first published in the 1970s – has in some ways been vindicated. Meehan Crist has noted that, in the intervening decades, research has concluded that ‘however improbable, teleological, or untestable it [the Gaia hypothesis] may be, it contains a nugget of truth more axiomatic than anyone would have guessed’.[7] We recognise today the earth’s complex regulatory patterns, a delicate stability built on the manifold interrelationships and feedback-loops between organic materials and environmental conditions, the balancing flows of sea levels and weather systems and so on. There are logics at play that transcend the objections to the Gaia theory, predicated as it is on a belief in the planet’s ‘sentience’. Ultimately – and perhaps this could be considered a key blind-spot in our conception of sentience itself – we have fallen victim to our own crude fiction of inviolability, our impulse to see ourselves as distinct from the world around us.
*
Sankey’s structures have a mutant quality. They are possessed of an uncanny strangeness, otherworldliness, materials evolving and mutating in apparent symbiosis – bleached wood bark merging with copper fixtures, porcelain, electric wiring. At a molecular level, genetic mutation can be understood as an evolutionary process, a mechanism for surviving hostile environments, a sort of DNA stress response. Sankey’s objects are mutant in this regard – like seismic mutations, forming in response to our own monstrous acceleration, survival mechanisms activated in response to the shifting – deteriorating – ecosystems that sustain us.
There is also something of cyborg about them, composed as they are of organic and mineral elements, fusing and extending into the infrastructure around them. One of the largest works in the exhibition, EarthLab,is composed from a set of 8 branches and stands vertical, about four metres high, its ends plumbed into the walls and floors and painted over the way such joins and fixes are often painted over, clumsily, not quite concealing the disruption.
From a certain angle, they have a sci-fi aspect too, reminiscent of the Martian invaders in War of the Worlds. They feel elemental, even; Sankey describes them as ‘chthonic’, aligning them with the Greek gods of the underworld. Drawing dark energies from under the earth, these are creatures animated by the unseen – the root systems, the electrical wiring, the water being funnelled and maintained and channelled underground. They are tapped into the infrastructure, fuelled by the natural resources we pump around and through our habitats; monstrous mutations assembled through the sheer kinetic force of the atomic energies – the bomb pulse – we have unleashed upon the world.
*
The entire world is entangled with the explosion [Hiroshima], a global dispersal of the bombing. The bomb continues to go off everywhere (but not everywhere equally). The whole world is downwind. … Histories, geopolitics, nothingness, written inside each cell.[8]
*
There is a danger here – a danger of which Sankey is keenly aware – of reducing ecological material to the status of metaphor. This is a point Barad makes too: to reckon with the Anthropocene, and with climate catastrophe, conventional understandings of matter and meaning need to be undone. Sankey recognises this, and reflects upon it within the work, taking what she recognises as settler-colonial practices – the bleaching of barkbranches, the reduction of organic material to sanitised tool – and utilising them as critical commentary. In a way, her work might be read as a satire of over-identification, a heralding of the monstrous future we are building.
I also see Sankey’s work in relation to contemporary practices in Ireland which reckon with questions surrounding land and environment and legacy: ecological, feminist, critical work by artists like Deirdre O’Mahoney, Michele Horrigan, Seoidín O’Sullivan, or those artists – again mostly women artists – whose work deals with farming and its ramifications, Maria McKinney, Lauren Gault, Katie Watchorn; work that attends to environmental mismanagement, questions of stewardship and cultivation as well as wreckage. These are artists whose work takes vastly different forms, of course, but with some key concerns in common: how to conceive of our relationship with the environments around us, across time, across scale.
*
In the Cube space by the entrance sits Small Planet, a work with a quite different quality. In this space, a small tree is held horizontally in mid-air, supported on a steel frame. Unlike the other tree-based structures in the exhibition, this one is living. The roots are not grounded exactly but the earth is intact around them. There are weeds growing out of the soil, which is plumbed with a pipe extending into a glass bowl full of water. This is a strange Quixotic arrangement, an experiment in sustaining life in suspended conditions. It is like an assemblage from a different sci-fi sub-genre: an image of cultivation in a disassembled future. The title refers to the home planet of the Little Prince – a small asteroid known as B 612 – with its volcanic activities and its ungovernable baobab trees. Small Planet suggests, maybe not quite hope, but a will to persist, an idea of continuance. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the artist will do her best to keep the tree alive, trimming the leaves and letting them drop, accumulating like hair on a salon floor.
[1] Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), 12.
[2] Ibid., 13.
[3] Karen Barad, ‘No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering’, in Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (eds.), Art of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 103.
[4] Joseph Masco, ‘Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post–Cold War New Mexico’, Cultural Anthropology, 19:4 (2004), quoted in Barad, ‘No Small Matter’, 109.
[5] Jodi Dean identifies this paralysing incapacity to conceive of climate change as a ‘whole’, arguing instead for the adoption of a partisan or ‘anamorphic’ perspective, a perspective that acknowledges the viewer’s necessarily limited position. See Jodi Dean, ‘The Anamorphic Politics of Climate Change’, e-flux journal, 69 (2016): 5.
[6] Karen Barad, ‘No Small Matter’, 108.
[7] Meehan Crist, ‘Our Cyborg Progeny’, London Review of Books, 43:1 (7 January 2021): 11.
{1] Karen Barad, ‘No Small Matter’, 106.