Cath Keay: A New Destiny Is Prepared

21 Aug 2006 in Argyll & the Islands, Visual Arts & Crafts

An Tobar, Tobermory, until 29 September 2006

CalMac Pier sculpture - an 'after work' picture

APPROACHING Cath Keay’s exhibition at An Tobar, the first thing one notices is the smell. The sweet, mellifluous scent of honey wafts through the café and foyer area, luring the visitor towards the gallery space like a bee towards a fragrant flower.

Once inside, one is met with the sight of six rather severe-looking plinths, each topped with a yellowish sculpture illuminated from beneath. Closer inspection reveals that the sculptures are models of buildings constructed from beeswax, and that they are standing on pools of honey, which explains the smell.

Cath Keay trained at Glasgow and Edinburgh schools of art, and is now based at the University of Newcastle, where she’s completing a PhD in sculpture. She has been using beeswax as a material since 1994, and in 1995 exhibited some of these works in Laing Solo, an annual programme of solo exhibitions by emerging artists at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle.

Prior to that she worked with other organic, food-related materials such as bread and soap, which she used to create text-based sculptures during a month-long artist-in-residence project at An Tobar.


Cath Keay’s work succeeds on a number of levels


Throughout her career there has been an interest in text, particularly the kind of grand statements made in the name of moral or social causes. The title piece of this exhibition is a long, horizontal lightbox which displays the words ‘A New Destiny is Prepared’. The words are formed from honeycomb, with lead shot dropped into the cells to mark out the shapes of the letters.

Such is the formality of the presentation that one feels this must be some kind of bold, totalitarian statement, but in fact it turns out to be simply a random sentence taken from a beekeeping manual. Thus Keay likes to overturn our assumptions, combining meaning with method in an unexpected and unpredictable way.

The rest of the pieces are all models of 1930s utilitarian buildings in the ‘International Style’ formed from beeswax. She chose buildings of this era because of her interest in idealism, the utopian view of the future that emerged between the world wars, and the buildings that resulted from it.

At the same time, there is a practical motivation for choosing this style of architecture, as she tells us that the long, flat shape of many of these buildings fits well into a ‘super’ or honey-making box. She enjoys the relationship between the original subject – 1930s architecture – and her technique, which uses bees to break down the original model, placing the work inside a bee hive for anything between one and three months to see what results.

The results are unpredictable, and demonstrate Keay’s willingness to allow the work to develop independently, intervening only as far as deciding how long to leave it inside the hive.

Bees are important to the work in both a symbolic and practical sense: as a highly efficient, structured group of individuals, all working for the collective good, they reflect many of the social ideals of the 1930s. They also help to build the work, or rather to break it down, creating a paradox that can be aligned again to the contradictions within human society of that era.

As part of the exhibition, An Tobar commissioned a sculpture of the ‘CalMac Pier’, a familiar feature of the town’s famous waterfront and the site of forceful campaigning in response to threats that it would be closed thirteen years ago.

Parallels can be drawn once again: local residents ‘swarmed’ in defence of their territory and in the end won the case. Another new piece, ‘Silk Moths’, is sited at Glengorm, a private home a few miles outside Tobermory. The work features ceramic sculptures of silk moths, with video footage of the insects’ courtship displays and an accompanying soundtrack.

The piece continues Keay’s interest in insects, but this time focusing on a creature that is redundant in nature, and only functions as a slave to human beings. In contrast to the bees, the silk moth represents the futility of some aspects of human activity – the society that has ‘developed’ to the point where it has ceased to function.

Cath Keay’s work succeeds on a number of levels: in visual terms, these are intricate and intelligent pieces that have been produced using an intriguing method. On a deeper level, the artist invites us to reflect on human society and the paradoxes and threats within it, using a somewhat sinister comparison with the insect world. All in all, plenty of food for thought.

© Juliet Knight, 2006

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