Katie O’Grady (She/ Her)
Katie O’Grady recently finished studying her masters in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) jointly at the Glasgow School of Art and University of Glasgow. She is a founding member of the Ragaire Collective, an artist-led curatorial group, and Sorey No Pics, a series of web-based curatorial projects. Following her graduation in 2017 from Limerick School of Art and Design, she worked as the event programmer for TACTIC Cork until July 2019. Katie’s practice is concerned with ideas of how we perceive, create and contribute to our world(s), drawing from the occult, folklore and ecological thought.
Katie O’Grady’s curatorial practice is located in a feminist methodology which embraces plurality, trust and co-authorship. Her work focuses friendship and care as its centre. ‘Falling in Love’ becomes a starting point for this, whereby the love of creating something together and developing discourse around given themes and topics becomes the inspiration for a projects initiation.[1]Ideas which re-occur throughout her work are that of ecological thought, magic practices such as the Tarot and processes of ‘fictioning’.[2]She is particularly drawn to the ways we can re-imagine our world, and how to access the possible alternate spaces which exist that allow for greater account between humans, non-humans and the more-than-human. Ambiguity and the rejection of anthropocentric values become the output of this desire. She wants to know what lies in the in-between, in the not-so-sure and the spaces for re-enchantment our world offers. She endorses the entanglement of thought and feeling through writing and visual art to journey these questions, and create world(s) we would like to inhabit.
[1] Tara McDowell, ‘Falling in love (Or is the curatorial a methodology?)’, Artlink (2019).
[2] David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
Projects
Hyper-Fox by Jack O'Flynn
THE PALACE OF HUMMING TREES
The Palace of Humming Trees is a collaborative project between artist Jack O’Flynn, writer Maria Sledmere and curator Katie O’Grady which took place from April to August 2021. This collaboration was showcased in an exhibition at French Street Studios, Glasgow, featuring new works from O’Flynn and Sledmere which travel through poetry, sculptural entities and dreams of impossible possibilities.
This project was formed in a concert – along mixtapes, Tarot readings, zoom calls and shared research. We present it here as multiple sensual journeys; to an exhibition of hyper-foxes and tenderly crumbling foliage, through a publication of lichenous illusions and rummaging thought and in a selection of music and voices which trailed our imaginings.
Intertwining themes of ecological thought, world-building and re-enchantment we sought to un-ravel the question: how can we act and think in this present moment to ensure positive change to our relationship with the world around us? The action and thinking which we wandered became located in small and monumental formats – enacted in the everyday and in how we create and build the future. We were enveloped by uncertain certainty, whether apparent through non-human thought, the possibilities of visual art and poetry or the endorsement of magic. Living in a world brimming with unease by climate crisis and extreme inequality – brought upon by extractive capital, far-right strategies and carceral logics – we wished to communicate a different model of awareness that could refuse these structures and re-imagine being a Being.
Exploring this sentiment O’Flynn and Sledmere have created a body of work that opens a portal to a forest of vibrating thought. One of galloping states, lockdown meanderings and a lyrical suffusion through language and art that prompts how we can think and imagine differently.
Check out more about the project over on THE PALACE OF HUMMING TREES website.
Project Links
