Artist : Kate Clark
Title : The Ghost
Medium : greater kudu & black wildebeest hide & horns, foam, clay, thead, pins, rubber eyes
Dimensions : 165 x 66 x 76 cm


ENQUIRE ABOUT THIS WORK

Kate Clark’s sculptures invite the viewer to experience an instinctive and primal reaction, that encourages further examination of our own humanity. Stitched over a hand-sculpted human face, the material quality of her ethically sourced animal hide brings an authenticity to the final sculpture, through what the artist describes as a unique energy and presence. We identify with animals through both our connection with and separation from them. Recognising these contradictions, Clark’s fusion of human and animal suggests that our human condition is fully realised only when we acknowledge and reconcile our current state and our natural instincts, acknowledging the animalistic inheritance within the human condition. She achieves this through emphasis on the characteristics that differentiate us from the rest of the animal kingdom, and, importantly, the ones that unite us.

Kate Clark lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Cornell University for her BFA and Cranbrook Academy of Art for her MFA and has been awarded fellowships from the Jentel Artists Residency in Wyoming, The Fine Arts Work Center Residency in Provincetown, MA, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program in New York. Clark was nominated for a USA Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award. She was awarded a grant from The Virginia Groot Foundation in 2013 and a New York Foundation For the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship Award in 2014. Clark has exhibited in solo museum exhibitions at the Mobile Museum of Art, The Newcomb Art Museum and the Hilliard Museum and in group museum exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Islip Art Museum, and The Bellevue Arts Museum, MOFA: Florida State University, Cranbrook Art Museum, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, The Winnepeg Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum, the Musée de la Halle Saint Pierre, Paris, The Art Gallery at Cleveland State University, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Biggs Museum of American Art, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Her work is collected internationally and is in public collections such as the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, the 21c Collection, the David Roberts Art Foundation and the C-Collection in Switzerland. Clark’s sculptures have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Magazine, Art21:Blog, The Village Voice, PAPERmag, The Atlantic, Hyperallergic, NYArts, Huffington Post, Hi Fructose, the BBC World News Brazil, Hey! Magazine, Time Out, ID Paris, Cool Hunting, Wallpaper, Creators Project/VICE, Sculpture Review and many other publications. In addition she was filmed by National Geographic in her studio over a 2 month period for a short documentary about her work.