Site Specific pigeon feathers and felt installation
200 x 120 x 70 cm approximately
Exhibited
'Dunkelheit', St Pancras Crypt, London (2007), Flora Fairbairn Projects
Illustrated
Financial Times, December 2007
Dead or Alive Catalogue, April 2010
This is a sire-specific installation, a watery torrent of feathers created to project from a sewer-like opening in St Pancras Crypt wall.
There is something disturbing, almost hellish, about this underground geyser of feathers; that they have been collected from pigeons - popularly known as 'rats with wings' - reinforces the sewer imagery. But this effluence is both vile and beautiful, eliciting repulsion and pleasure in equal measure.
The process of 'collecting and re-using' that characterises some of Kate's practice has been taken to the extreme in this work, which uses thousands of feathers sent in by pigeon-fanciers from all over the UK; the feathers their birds moult aren't treasured or collected but, when used in large quantities, have an exquisite, painterly quality at odds with their vermin-like status.
