Gallery 4

Why is my age important?

Kate Coyne

Roomsheet

Kate Coyne's studio practice explores how experience can be embodied and the nature of the relationship between the body/experience and materiality in a socio-political feminist context. The language of materials and process enable an exploration of the nongendered body and vulnerability.

Kate’s work is shaped from ‘king and queen’-sized foam mattresses and inflatables. The site-specific work fills the space and embodies the ageing form and a posthuman feminist view of time and gender from new and found materials. The work transforms sheets of foam and inflatables into a series of large wall and floor based forms which hover between painting and sculpture.

A large foam installation shows the physical and mental embodiment of the abject, ‘waiting’ and the ageing body. Temporality, the progression of past, present and future is inherent, with materials discolouring over time and gravity taking over form and identity in the same way that it does with an ageing, sagging body.

Her ongoing exploration of the readymade informs the inflatables, an assemblage of inflated bodies. The work is given form by means of inflation, resulting in a form that is created by air that has political and environmental connotations.There is a suggestion of surrender in the sagging, deflating forms that are inherently unstable and vulnerable to puncture.The abject look of a body in the work is a physical manifestation and the mental embodiment of the results of ageing and acknowledgement of the fact that age renders invisibility. The title of the show queries the need for an age of the artist to be supplied in the application /proposal process.