Join artist Katie Schwab as she experiments with new ideas, turning the Gallery into an open studio with opportunities to speak with the artist and participate in two workshops. Throughout the week the space will change and develop as the artist works.
During the Artist Intervention Week, Katie will explore methods of stitching, dyeing and painting with natural and re-used materials. She will combine new and pre-existing works to create a series of experimental ‘Samplers’ across the gallery space. There will be opportunities to get involved and you are invited to talk to Katie during her residency.
Katie will also facilitate two ‘Textileworking’ workshops during the week, combining practical making sessions with insights into histories of textile design and craft practice. To book the following workshops; Textileworking02 – Stitches and Textileworking03 – Plant Material please see What's On.
About the artist
Katie Schwab’s practice interweaves personal, social, and craft-based histories, often drawing from marginalised and overlooked traditions of living, making and working collectively. Spanning textiles, furniture, print and moving image, her practice seeks to question, and give form to, underrepresented histories of domestic and civic design.
Often working in a context-responsive way, Katie’s projects grow through deep archival research and corresponding active learning within the sphere of endangered crafts; working with experienced makers to develop skills in, for example, tapestry weaving, natural dyeing and basketry. This research often grows to incorporate workshops, improvised making, batch production and documentation, leading to the formation of exhibitions, printed resources and design commissions. These projects make visible their material composition and modes of production, fore-fronting the people and processes involved in shaping new bodies of work.
Drawing on family histories of migration, factory work and domestic craft, Katie’s current research interests centre around the work of inter- and post- war emigré artists and designers. Recent projects have explored Hans Tisdall’s designs for Plymouth’s post-war Council House and the abstract textile works of Sonia Delaunay, Anni Albers and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Katie’s practice brings together networks of makers and learners to explore the ways in which these designs can speak to contemporary conditions of social upheaval and corresponding questions around women’s work, movement, labour, housing and public space.
Katie Schwab (b. 1985, London) lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include A Working Building, The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth (2019); Jerwood Solo Presentations, Jerwood Space, London (2016); Making the Bed, Laying the Table, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Glasgow (2016) and Together in a Room, Collective, Edinburgh (2016). Recent projects include This Interesting and Wonderful Factory, Clore Sky Studio Commission, Tate St Ives, St Ives (2018); Atrium Commissions, mima, Middlesbrough (2017) and A Portable Mural, Serpentine Galleries, London (2017). She was the recipient of the 2016 Nigel Greenwood Art Prize, the 2017 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Residency at Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, the 2018/19 New Contemporaries/ SPACE Studio Bursary and the 2017-19 Design Residency at Plymouth College of Art.
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