Kathryn Spence: Dirty and Clean

January 29, 2012 to June 10, 2012 |

San Francisco-based artist Kathryn Spence is inspired by nature in the production of her sculptures and installations. Using found, dirty, and discarded materials in order to point to the invasion of the natural environment by human-produced garbage, she accurately re-creates wildlife from scraps of paper, fabric, string, and wire. The avid birder and lover of nature is capable of distinguishing particular species from a great distance and able to create animals portraying clear, distinct personalities and identities with incredible exactitude.

Spence’s nuanced, obsessive, and busy gathering of seemingly “dirty” used materials has its counterpart in the way she impeccably reorganizes them in the sculptures. When seen from afar, works such as Untitled (2005–6) may bring to mind an unquenched desire for accumulation and the notion of pathological hoarding, yet Spence’s works are overtaken by the greater compulsion of organization. On closer inspection, her ordering of the materials in stacks, piles, and bundles, and the balanced composition of the overall cluster, allows us to find relationships and commonalities amongst all the parts. We may even find immense beauty in these orderly accumulations.