For twenty years, Kate McGwire, a British artist and sculptor, has been transforming ambivalent and discarded feathers with an Ovidian sensibility—collected and sorted in large quantities, they have become her unlikely and ephemeral raw material.
— Keith Roberts
Kate McGwire, born in 1964, is an artist based in London. Growing up in the Norfolk Broads, her connection to nature and fascination with birds were nurtured from an early age. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004.
Her earliest memories are inspired by the landscape of her childhood, dominated by wetlands, winding waterways, and the wildlife along the region’s waters. These experiences form the foundation of her practice, which draws on the cycles, patterns, and dualities of nature.
Using feathers as her primary medium, McGwire engages in intensive processes of collecting, sorting, and cleaning her materials to create sinuous and powerful forms that evoke classical sculpture and mythological creatures. Her works explore aesthetic dualities, both alluring and unsettling, formal dualities oscillating between the organic and the abstract, and the duality of movement, simultaneously fluid and still. In her practice, McGwire elevates feathers, often lost or discarded, to create enigmatic forms that explore both physical space and intimacy.
Her sculptures have been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2004, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in 2010, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris in 2014, Fondazione Berengo in Murano in 2020, and more recently at the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval in 2025 and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2023 as part of the international touring exhibition Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses.