Artist Center: Kathryn Spence

Kathryn Spence creates objects and drawings that reference the natural world. She makes owls, wolves, and other creatures as if they are right from nature. Spence herself is an avid birder, gardener, and conservationists. She creates her works that attempt to order and arrange both recognizable and unrecognizable forms as metaphors for psychological spaces.

Spence makes animals out of everyday objects, such as trash, wire, string and other miscellaneous objects. She sets them up as if they are real, such as an owl on a perch, with maybe a little of the string hanging down to give the viewer a sense of if it is real or not. She uses these objects to help build a bridge between what is artificial and the existence of the untamed natural world that surrounds us. Her works are detailed, most are life size to the creature she is creating, and each one is unique in what she uses to create it, whether it is old clothes, plastic bags or string. Spence does use recycled materials the most, but she even used pieces of her own clothes to make the animals look real. She poses them the way she does as if it is in nature, and the animals are looking at us, staring us down.

Kathryn Spence takes objects we may and do throw out every day and uses them to create something beautiful. Her creations are lifelike that they give you a sense that she plucked them from nature and put them in the gallery. Her works are there to help us understand that using materials that are already there and available instead of throwing them out is the way we should go. If she can create something as beautiful as her animals, so can the world.