Kate Hampel
In my artistic practice, I critically examine the material aesthetics of power and violence from the individual to the institutional and geopolitical. This has ranged in past projects from an exploration of the shifting power dynamics at play in online personal ads, to the feedback loops generated by digital imagery of terrorism, and more recently to the material aesthetics of the American carceral state. My projects take varied forms including sculpture, installation, and video, but consistent throughout my work is a material ethos, which bolsters the work’s conceptual elements by incorporating “low” materials with tactile, bodily resonance: dirt, salt, cotton cloth.
This series of drawings is a collaboration with my daughter as part of a shared daily observational practice. Over the course of the last year I have been drawing the vultures whose migratory patterns bring them to my home every winter in an effort to understand and interrogate my own feelings of distaste and revulsion. The association with mortality and decay is unavoidable but through slow looking and daily drawing I have come to know them in other, more holistic, ways.
Kate Hampel holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal. Her work has been shown at museums, galleries and art fairs in the United States, Canada, and Asia, and she has participated in residency programs across the United States. She has been the recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Individual Artist Grant and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Fountainhead Fellowship in Craft/Material Studies. She currently lives in Bishopville, Ohio, where she is cofounder of FOLLY, an artist residency for artists, writers, and scholars, and teaches at Ohio University’s School of Art + Design.
Instagram @katehampel