Born and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Cathy Wilkes trained at Glasgow School of Art and is part of the generation of artists who emerged in the mid-1990s. Wilkes is primarily known for her large-scale installations of seemingly disparate objects, many of which are distressed, damaged, altered or adapted. Her ensembles slowly evolve out of a working method that begins with the meticulous collection and selection of materials and ends with the measured task of arrangement, re-arrangement, making and re-making. The refined, physical manifestations of a continual process of intellectual introspection and existential questioning, Wilkes’s installations explore the multiplicity of meanings, both personal and universal, that objects are capable of evoking, or representing. Cathy Wilkes is also a painter. Her predominantly abstract works on canvas tend to mirror the intensive labour that goes into her installations – the canvases are worked on, set aside, scraped clean and worked on again. Previously incorporated into her sculptural environments, Wilkes’s paintings have gained greater autonomy in recent years.
Read MoreCathy Wilkes (b. 1966) represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and her work was included in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include: I Give You All My Money, The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 2012; Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, 2011; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 2011; Kunstverein, Munich, 2011; Mummy’s Here, Studio Voltaire, London, 2009; The Modern Institute, Glasgow, 2008 and the Milton Keynes Gallery, 2008.
Cathy Wilkes was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1966. She lives and works in Glasgow.
Text courtesy Xavier Hufkens.
