Katherine Sankey—Hydrozomes // water bodies

Pallas Projects/Studios are pleased to present Katherine Sankey—Hydrozomes // water bodies the tenth and final exhibition of our 2020/21 Artist-Initiated Projects programme.
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Katherine Sankey's sculpture uses living plant tissue and human supply lines to engage in the geo-feminist conversation about what we gouge and suck from the planet. Her practice examines mutation and the human extractive machine of supply and power in a multi-species context. Her artworks engage with how we as people adapt and colonize as well as inhabit territories.

Sankey’s sculpture is linear and combines arboreal elements, plumbing, electrics and video. Her practice seeks to challenge assumptions about both the boundaries of the human and what constitutes a ‘natural’ object or environment. In its uncanny representations of embodiment and parasitic invasion of a host space, Sankey’s sculpture holds a grimy, distorted mirror to ‘the real’.

Hydrozomes is a collection of artworks from the last 3 years shown for the first time, or in new configurations. As you enter, Sankey’s sculptural grammar connects the invisible linear apparatus of water and energy conduction surrounding us in our built environments, with the living organisms of wood, lichen and crustacean parts.

​Then there is Hydrozomes, a sprawling installation incorporating ‘studies’ of hybrid mineral bodies as organic architectures. Here we encounter Sankey’s studio practice ‘mid-process’; a rogue hydroponics of sorts, inhabiting the experimental nature of the Artist-Initiated Projects.

'Sankey’s work asks important questions about how we connect to the unseen and to the mechanisms that we take for granted in the small, routine moments of our lives. Her sculpture gestures to the delicate balance of our ecosystems (in the strict sense of the word but also our own personal systems, both constructed and natural). Her practice also alludes to the sometimes awkward or precarious quality of these systems, brought to the fore in the manner that artworks are made, balanced and suspended. (…) I am drawn to the ways that these artworks allude to time, in that their energies and flow are open in terms of direction, again representing a crucial focus on process, rather than on a cohesive beginning or end.' — Julie Morrissy, excerpt from File Note lV, a Fire Station Artists’ Studios publication, 2021.​