Kathy Prendergast FRSS

Intimate in tone and subject matter, Kathy Prendergast’s practice combines drawing, sculpture and installation. What might appear minimal or elusive at first glance can encompass a complex web of emotional, personal and political resonances. Proximate to the body and connecting subjective reflections on the world, her work explores a potent cluster of issues including power, identity, landscape, memory, geography, and family. A connection between the body and landscape, often manifested through mapping, can be traced back to the beginning of her practice. Often using redaction or removal as a device, creating negative space through black ink, coloured paint or white paper, the artist erases or overwrites geographic expressions of power. Prendergast points out the subjectivity of maps, their inherent colonialism, and the ultimate fragility of borders and territories over time. Though delicate, fragile and usually on a human scale, her works also point towards the infinite – suggesting the vastness of space or the constellations of the sky. Prendergast’s work is methodical – the product of slow, repetitive processes requiring patience, precision and devotion. Faithful to mark-making, drawing and hand-crafting as well as the revelatory potential of sparking unfamiliar connections with everyday objects, her work is enigmatic, eerily beautiful and emotionally resonant.

Kathy Prendergast lives and works in London.