The Golden Bough: Katie Holten

Katie Holten combines drawing, sculpture and text for her Golden Bough installation sited in gallery 8 at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. This new work continues her exploration and ongoing interest in organic processes and in the relationship between drawing and object.

At the root of Katie Holten’s practice is a curiosity with life’s systems. Examining the meaning of ‘environment’ and the significance of place, her work is an ongoing investigation of the inextricable relationship between man and the natural world. She has previously collaborated with historians, geophysicists, musicians, botanists, ecologists, teachers, and architects, on projects as diverse as creating a temporary outdoor museum along a street in New York City or revealing the affects of climate change on weeds.

Holten often works in black and white but for this project she will incorporate the ‘average’ colour of the universe as determined by astronomers at the John Hopkins University, Baltimore; – both the ‘correct’ and the ‘incorrect’ versions.

In December 2009 she participated in Tipping Point at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York as she continues collaborating with Klaus Lackner (Geophysicist and Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, Earth Institute, at Columbia) – the results of which are also included in her installation for The Golden Bough.

Curated by Michael Dempsey

Profile

Katie Holten is an artist, activist and author. In 2003, she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Nevada Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Hugh Lane Gallery. Her work investigates the entangled relationships between humans and the natural world. She has created Tree Alphabets, a Stone Alphabet, and a Wildflower Alphabet to share the joy she finds in her love of the more-than-human world. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and frieze. She is a visiting lecturer at the New School of the Anthropocene.