Yvonne Scott celebrates some seminal works in the practice of artist Kathy Prendergast
The iconic Waiting (1980) and the recent ‘Stasis Field’ exhibition effectively bookend Kathy Prendergast’s creative process to date, revealing her principal interest in human circumstances and emotions explored through unexpected materials. These media have been selected less for their practicality and durability and more for their contribution to the meaning of the artworks. Her materials have included dressmaking patterns, human hair, stones and rocks, yarn, glass vitrines, desiccated flowers and familiar everyday objects. The most common materials relate to cartography: she has used maps and the technology of their production both as medium and as subject, aware of the myriad connotations of wayfinding and entitlement as well as the enduring aesthetic appeal of the map. Running through her process is the connection between two-dimensional diagrams (as in scientific treatises and atlases) and the three-dimensional reality (such as the body or the landscape) it seeks to signify.
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