Kate McCambridge is a performance artist and sculptor working in bronze, marble, wood, wax, cotton, steel, and rebar. Her performances are compositions of body, materials, architecture and time. She and her collaborators lean apart to hold a form of rope and rebar taut in the air between them, carry and counterweight framed armatures the size of doorways, stand chest-deep in still water holding a branch in a high arc that its reflection extends beneath the surface. The actions unfold live, urgent and responsive to the moment, and they hold an intensity that swings between exuberance and austerity, tenderness and force, sometimes within a single gesture.

 

Her sculptures are drawn from that same territory, related to the performances without one following from the other. A fold or seam remains where fabric was once cinched taut against a body. A hardened cloth strains toward a scaffolding that has long since vanished. Though cured and set, a finished composition looks slightly in motion. Across both forms, neither flesh nor object exists entirely on its own. Even after the frame or figure that first accompanied a sculpture is taken away, the object still carries the trace of having been held, pulled, wrapped, or pushed.

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Fabric dipped in wax hardens to a sheen like fish skin or worn leather. Patinated bronze shifts from deep brown to blues, purples, and reds, and its lines change so sharply with the angle of approach that a single sculpture can seem like a different object from each side of the room. At every stage, the work holds anticipation, an event suspended rather than settled.

 

Kate McCambridge (b.1985, Chicago, IL) holds degrees from the Royal College of Art, Imperial College London, and Harvard University. Her work has been performed and exhibited internationally, including with Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Kunstal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen. Her sculptures are held in private collections in New York, Chicago, Connecticut, Copenhagen, and Shanghai, and she has undertaken residencies at UAP (Polich Tallix) in New York, Quarra Stone in Wisconsin, Fonderia Artistica Battaglia in Italy, and the Danish Artist Workshops in Denmark. She lives and works in New York.