Kathleen McGiveron

As a visual artist, Kathleen is compelled to produce large works. She enjoys working with clay because the material allows her to form any shape that plays in her mind. Kathleen produces works that are a mixture of 80’s fashion, science fiction, and fantasy. She aspires to produce more creatures and eventually experiment with decals to explore new skills. Kathleen will learn to produce her works even larger so that her art overwhelms the viewer. She wants the delicate material of ceramics to not feel so delicate but feel fearful or indestructible, thus she wants to start producing robotic limbs and incorporate the delicate material of clay with such a durable material as steel to make the ceramics believably metallic.

McGiveron wants her art to make the viewer question reality; the question what is possible and what is not. She would love them to not realize the make of the sculpture is ceramic, but realize as an after thought. Kathleen enjoys exploring all possibilities of clay, not just pottery or toilets but as creatures and large sculptures or mechanical figures. She decides what she will do through emotion for what she does is emotion based; she doesn’t work from physical images, rather works from images of her mind. With ceramics Kathleen wants to accomplish an industrial produced look with her pieces because ceramics is easily reproducible and is one of the fine qualities of the material that should be kept.

Her current work is large but not large enough; she wants to explore the aspects of nature with the material and express the natural disasters that occur to British Columbia’s forest such as the Pine Beetle. Kathleen feels that having grown up in British Columbia her whole life she is strongly influenced by her environment.  Kathleen will also explore mechanics in ceramic material; she wants to look at forms that are known to be metal but in the material of ceramics.  By attempting and exploring this she hope to gain better knowledge and boundaries of the material.

Kathleen McGiveron’s piece, ‘Stretch’, is an art deco style ceramic mask coated in a latex skin. One half of the mask has an aged look, and the other half has a pulled and stretched appearance so that the wrinkles and excess skin has been removed from the face. Incision lines have been drawn on the stretched skin on the lifted side to show where the cuts and lifts will happen. Kathleen wanted to show the before and after of a face lift. She chose to work with ceramic for its texture, building qualities, relationship to bone, and tradition in the art of masks. The latex has a stretchy quality and reminds her of the bonds of cells in the skin and the collagen that keeps the elasticity of the face. Kathleen was inspired for this piece by an interview of Larry King with Dolly Parton, where in the end he told her ‘Your plastic surgery looks beautiful Dolly.’ Kathleen realized how plastic surgery was an art, thus in an art deco style she showed the art in the art of plastic surgery. Kathleen hopes to continue exploring different body transformations in these materials to help her understand the process and if it relates to her own art process.