British artist Cathie Pilkington works in sculpture and site-specific installation, often with reference to the development of figurative sculpture in the art historical canon, whether traditional, modern, or contemporary. She is known for her playfully incongruous integrations of props, studio furniture and other readymade objects.
Read MorePilkington studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1986 to 1991. From 1995 to 1997, she studied at the Royal College of Art.
In 2014 Pilkington was elected as a Royal Academician. She took up the post of professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools in 2016 and in 2020 was elected Keeper.
Pilkington combines the familiar and uncanny, macabre and abject, banal and fetishised, fabricating assemblages that use contrasting or unexpected combinations of materials and found objects. Blurring the boundaries between craft, domesticity and contemporary art, Pilkington generates novel situations and hybridises animal and human forms as though a puppeteer of the material and living worlds.
Writing for The Medal in 2012, Benedict Carpenter observed of Pilkington's earlier sculptures that 'the sculptural language of these objects is not about expressive handling or the emotion of the artist, but something more akin to the unsettling prop. As the hand disappears, so too does the artist, and the sculpture begins to assert itself'.
Pilkington frequently produces polychromatic figurative sculptures, albeit almost always manipulated or altered in ways that appear uncanny or surreal. Her painted bronze Reclining Doll (2013) consists of an awkwardly reclining young girl with pointed legs and an abstracted left arm that bends perpendicular to the floor. With an ambivalent, enigmatic gaze, the doll stares out towards the viewer.
Pilkington described her pluralistic approach to creating Reclining Doll, with the sculpture exemplifying 'how these different positions get combined into one object – Henry Moore, Picasso, a doll, bronze, fabric, oil paint, naturalism and modernist body parts, all mixed up and cast into one object.'
For her series Degas Dolls (2017), Pilkington was inspired by Degas' maquettes of dancers to create multiple doll sculptures from clay. Assembled in piecemeal fashion, with each limb and body part constructed separately and later joined together, the Degas Dolls occupy a space between doll and statue.
Other sculptures by Pilkington hybridise human and animal forms, as seen in Girl's World (2021) – a long-maned sphinx figure that sits atop a two-tiered steel frame, with the lower tier stacked with large woollen blankets and footballs. Inspired by the artist's teenage daughter, Girl's World aims to capture a state of 'in-betweenness' or 'becoming' in a bricolage of ancient and modern references.
Pilkington's 2021 exhibition Estin Thalassa at Karsten Schubert London consisted of numerous large-scale sculptural assemblages and installations, with objects and props alluding to the realms of set design, window dressing, or bric-a-brac shops. By gathering together a disorienting multitude of such works, Pilkington aimed to mirror and extend the excess and bizarre nature of contemporary life.
Old footballs collected by the artist while out on walks with her dog and husband were piled atop each other inside the fireplace. In the same room, a floor-to-ceiling sculptural installation titled The Deposition (2021) comprised a large laundry rack affixed to the ceiling with metres of sweeping fabrics billowing to the ground.
In a 2021 interview with Studio International, Pilkington stated: '...the contemporary white-walled gallery space is a space that is ... insulated from life. The ideas of integration and democracy ... happen much more readily in other kinds of spaces. Not just domestic spaces, but spaces that are like found objects, which bring with them a history and content that you have to take on and reckon with in some way.'
In 2014, Pilkington received the Sunny Dupree Award for Reclining Doll (2013).
Cathie Pilkington has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Estin Thalassa, Karsten Schubert London (2021); Night Sea Journey, SPRING/BREAK Art Show (with Karsten Schubert London); New York (2021); Working from Home, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2019); Working from Home, Dorich House Museum, London (2018); Doll for Petra, Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, Ditchling (2017); Life Room: Anatomy of a Doll, Royal Academy Schools, London (2017); The Value of the Paw, V&A Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green (2012).
Selected group exhibitions include: FIAC Online Viewing Room (2021) and The Covering, Karsten Schubert London (2020).
Pilkington's works are held in the collections of Pallant House Gallery, Deste Foundation, Manchester City Art Gallery, Hunterian, Glasgow University, Omer Koc Collection and the David Roberts Art Foundation.
Cathie Pilkington's website can be found here, and her Instagram here.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2023
