A bird in the hand

Kate MccGwire creates her sculptures from feathers, often collected from racing pigeons. The results, says Teleri Lloyd-Jones, are spectacular and ever so slightly unsettling

Kate MccGwire has just completed her biggest piece to date. Currently installed in her one-woman show at All Visual Arts, Gyre is a nine-metre long black tentacle – it bursts through the white cube wall, creeping and twisting across the floor, skin made from MccGwire’s material of choice: thousands of feathers.

Astonishingly, all her work is created at her studio, a Dutch barge on the River Thames. Most pieces aren’t more than 70 centimetres wide, and fit through the door – Gyre’s dimensions are so monstrous that it was made outside, on the barge’s decking. Maybe it was our proximity to the water or the thought of her chimeric creations, but as we stood there chatting in the cold, but I couldn’t stop myself quoting Jaws: ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’ We giggle and she agrees, but for the time being she’s happy here.

Her tactile, luxurious surfaces are created from layers of feathers, taken from birds like crows and pigeons, at the very least everyday, if not reviled. The forms are uneasily organic, writhing and sliding. For a viewer this is a little confusing, as each piece is at once recognisable and unknowable, natural but alien. MccGwire’s aim is to seduce you with an ‘aesthetic beauty that you’re disturbed by at the same time… I don’t want them to be regarded as being merely beautiful – because then I would have failed.’

The past decade has seen taxidermy rise and then fall in art and design, but it would be foolish to lump MccGwire in with this. Not only does she push her material beyond anything it may previously have resembled, but her feathers are waste products from natural moulting. Death isn’t a part of the process – instead the practice is an exquisite kind of recycling, a re-imagining. Making smaller pieces from the quills she initially cuts off the feathers, MccGwire has a comforting nothing is wasted attitude.

Her studio wall is lined with Perspex boxes filled with feathers. Each one has been categorised according to bird type and the direction in which the feather points. The quills are removed, so that the final surface lies flatter, but nothing is dyed – the colours are all the originals found in nature. ‘It’s like painting, but it’s a material that’s already there,’ MccGwire tells me. ‘I find it completely intuitive but other people just don’t get it. Patterning, I think, is something that’s completely inbuilt.’

Even before she began her feather pieces, MccGwire’s work manifested the impulse of repetition and patterning. She refers to the making process as a kind of meditation, and the repeated action is no doubt part of this. ‘It’s an important part of it, but it’s not repetition for repetition’s sake – it’s to achieve something overwhelming,’ she says. The process is almost obsessive, I suggest. MccGwire smiles: ‘Almost. I’m not a scary person.’

She came to her fine art practice as a second career. She had wanted to go to art school when she was younger, but her parents wouldn’t allow it: ‘I feel sad in that sense that I could have been doing this 20 years before.’ Her time as a designer at an interior architects, though creatively unfulfilling, gave her an excellent training in spatial awareness, draughtsmanship and collaborating. In her spare time, she tried to satisfy her artistic leanings with life drawing and ceramics classes. Then – with her second child just six weeks old – she started a part-time BA in Fine Art at UCA Farnham. She began her studies expecting to become a painter, but after various rotations around disciplines she ‘realised that I liked physically making stuff.’

A Masters in sculpture at the Royal College of Art followed. Graduating at 40, MccGwire says of her time as a mature student at the college: ‘There were a lot of young, groovy people who were ambitious, and I don’t think they ever saw me. I don’t think I existed to them. So when my work sold I was really really shocked.’ Surely any fine art student’s dream, MccGwire had Charles Saatchi buy a piece on the first day of the graduate show. Brood, a 2.3 metre wall piece, was made from 27,000 wishbones in a dizzying spiral. ‘I’m never going to have a space like this to exhibit in again,’ she recalls thinking as the show opened, ‘so I’ll go for it and afterwards I’ll put them away, keep them underneath my bed in boxes and maybe show them again sometime.’ Instead, a week later, she found herself packing Brood up in boxes, piling into a taxi and installing the piece at the Saatchi Gallery.

Moving onto the barge after leaving the RCA, MccGwire one day noticed (‘spiralling down like sycamore spinners’) the dropped feathers of moulting feral pigeons living in a nearby derelict barn. Collecting this debris, she realised she’d need more and turned to racing pigeon enthusiasts for help. She likes to make work out of stuff that’s hard to get your hands on, because, as she says: ‘If you make something out of a material that you can’t get anywhere, it makes it miraculous.’ So she got in touch with around 200 pigeon racers and fanciers, in the hope that they would supply her. That was five years ago, and regular donations continue to arrive in MccGwire’s postbag. She keeps all the letters sent with the feathery offerings, reading about their racing successes as well as, in some instances, family news. One woman called Jill sent a box of tiny, tufty feathers from Fred, her recently deceased budgie. Over six years Jill diligently collected Fred’s feathers: ‘Every time he was cleaned out and had a good flutter,’ as she wrote in a letter. Appreciative of such efforts and communications, MccGwire tries to pay her helpers nominal amounts, but the money is politely declined. In lieu of payment, she sends presents – chocolates one year, the next a tea-towel printed with the lifecycle of a feather that ended up in her studio. As the majority of her donors live up north, they don’t get to visit MccGwire’s exhibitions, which are invariably in the south or abroad, and in the new year she hopes to rectify this, inviting her collaborators to a tea in the gallery. She also has plans to film a pigeon release.

Her use of language is painstaking and precise. After a piece has been made, the artist searches for a title, often a single old-fashioned or archaic word with a dual meaning. For example, Brood refers to a sense of melancholy as well as the family of birds, while Lure, the name of the current show, refers to the pull of fascination as well as the ring of feathers a falconer uses to command his or her birds. Her taste for the visceral is obvious: other titles are Gag, Taunt, Whelm, Splice, Surge, Stigma and Gyre. As a result, even on paper her work has a weight to it, an aggression that strongly contrasts with the delicate feathery starting point.

There’s a sensuality too, at once hard to define and undeniable. In some pieces this vague, difficult eroticism has explicit underpinnings. Orchis is a feathered sculpture suspended from a clamp under a glass dome, with a twin pendulous shape similar to an orchid root, this particular shape inspired by the flower’s naming, from the Greek word for testicle. Lure begins with quotations from Mark Cocker’s and Richard Mabey’s Birds Britannica, which present potted histories of the magpie, the pigeon and so on. Such connections are important for MccGwire, and give her work meaning beyond the aesthetic: ‘The historic importance of an object is vitally important for me. Wishbones are a pagan symbol, families would break the wishbone, but it was regarded as the female pudenda. It was a symbol of virginity… It’s fundamentally important that my work isn’t just pretty – I’m using common British birds that are devalued, regarded as vermin… I’m trying to get you to think again about something you think you know is a fact. The dove and the pigeon are exactly the same bird – except one is albino. And one is a symbol of purity, while the other is foul.’

MccGwire’s larger works are dramatic showstoppers, but some of her smaller pieces are just as affecting. On show in Lure, her Stigma series are framed lead surfaces punctured in places to reveal a sprouting of feathers underneath. Stigma continues her interest in maligned materials, with a delectable contrast between the heavy, smothering lead and the lively pop of feathers. The dull but beautiful metal looks startlingly like skin, with its soft folds and a feeling of containment. The pieces began from the old riddle, a favourite of MccGwire’s father: What’s heavier, a tonne of feathers or a tonne of lead? Challenged by the process of using lead, MccGwire finds it beguiling: ‘It’s really unnerving, whatever you finish it on it’ll adopt the undulations of the surface underneath.’

With her first monograph published this month, 2013 is off to a good start. And while there are more works in plan, you can be sure she’ll be pushing her practice and her materials further and further. ‘They’re mad,’ she exclaims of her pieces. ‘Unless they’re in a cabinet you can’t keep them, they’re temporary. But that’s what I like, I want to be known for doing bonkers things that people want to come and see because they won’t exist anywhere else.’

And what’s underneath all these feathers? She’s asked this a lot, but she never tells.

Lure is at All Visual Arts, 2 Omega Place, London N1 9DR, (020) 7843 0410. until 16 February. The book Lure will be published by AVA in January www.allvisualarts.org www.katemccgwire.com