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Caitlin McCormack Studio Visit

Posted on March 15 2019

As part of Caitlin McCormack's fourth solo presentation at Paradigm, we went to her studio to hear more about her process. Here are some highlights from the interview, featuring questions from Paradigm's Instagram followers. 

Question: Firstly, I love Caitlin McCormack’s work. Obviously this material is perfect for her to get across her vision. However, if there was no financial limit, time limit, space or universe limit is there any other material she’d be eager to work with?

Caitlin: Thank you for saying nice things about what I do, first of all. To answer your question, I think about human veins a lot, as a material to work with, haha. I don’t know. Someone once suggested that I dip my pieces in ceramic slip and fire them. I think that would be really cool. I sometimes wish I had the ability to weld, to make large scale and very structurally sound works out of metal and all kinds of, like, “big important artist” materials. I have a lot of insecurities about the fact that I’m a fiber artist, but at the same time, I’m unsure if being insecure about my material is what should be motivating me to work with another medium. I wish I had more opportunities to mess around with all kinds of extremely heavy materials in order to build large structures, maybe outdoors. I think it would be really awesome to try something like that.

Question: Would you rather be super tall and made out of gold, or Borrowers-sized but made out of shrimp?

Caitlin: Definitely Borrowers-sized and made out of shrimp, because maybe a small fish would eat me, eventually. Fish are pretty highly evolved beings and I’d like to contribute to their life cycle.

Sara: Is this live shrimp or dead shrimp?

Caitlin: Yeah that’s a good point.

Jason: Frozen.

Sara: Frozen shrimp. [Group laughter]

Caitlin: Frozen live shrimp.

Jason: Wow, deep.

Question: For some of your new stuff I noticed there are what look like fabric sections. Is that like skin or… something else?

Caitlin: Where the framed torsos are concerned, I guess I was considering the fabric to be sort of skin-like. I also just kind of acknowledge it as fabric, a symbolic membrane. But yeah, I think in those particular pieces it’s definitely supposed to be reminiscent of like a fleshy sheath, which operates on several different levels.

Question: Which body parts of yours will/won’t be attending your opening this month?

Caitlin: Hmm. Well I know I specified that my feet will be there. Honestly, maybe it’ll be like an Osiris kind of situation, so everything but one very crucial part will be present.


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