Soft Errors - installation shot 01 - Andy Harper and Kate Terry
Kate Terry - 7523 - slider
Soft Errors - installation shot - Andy Harper and Kate Terry

In Shoreditch Town Hall as part of the “Heart of Glass” exhibition I first came across Kate’s installations in a derelict room with a torn-out floor. Several shapes spanning the space in their idiosyncratic parallel threading, one had to bend and bow to cross the room, always in danger of a soft collision. Many installations later Kate has challenged the Georgian architecture of the gallery space on several occasions as well as the layout of fair booths in Basel and Hong Kong, where we had to cordon off the stand at times such was the amazement. Kate’s simple means develop to an awe-inspiring effect, her meandering forms are permeable yet powerfully present, modest and refined yet spectacular.

Kate Terry is best known for her expansive yet delicate and ephemeral installations made entirely from tensed threads. Site specific and in continual dialogue with the surrounding space, her installations and sculptures are ultimately architectural interventions; a play on perception. Extending from wall to wall, the colourful threads intersect and change direction. Little detracts from the interaction between her sculptural installs and the emptied architectural structure that they softly rearrange. Kate’s works are about light, which is refracted, shapes that are formed and surfaces that are broken and moved depending on where the visitor stands and how he moves in space.

Unusual for her otherwise decisively Post-Minimalist vocabulary, Terry combines contrasting and intense colours such as neon yellow, orange, purplishpink and blue. The colours add dynamism to the three-dimensional experience and a playfulness to the accurately calculated designs. Almost like recessed safety nets at various heights, the laterally running threads form free-floating shapes in vibrant colourations.

In addition, Terry produces floor based sculptures, that combine geometric shapes with industrial materials such as wood or concrete. She also inserts her stretched threads in these condensed yet open constructions of single and combined geometric forms, which are assembled on pedestals, freely distributed over the room, leaning to walls or are directly connected to them.

Finally, Terry’s drawings on paper function as plans or sketches for the resulting room-filling installations but also as independent works of art, in which the artist feels free to experiment and exaggerate the formulation of her compositions.

Kate Terry’s recent exhibitions include installations at Oxford University and Newlyn Art Gallery in the UK as well as the Virginia Commonwealth University in Doha, Qatar and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in Michigan, US.

 

 

 

Exhibitions at the gallery:

Soft Errors, 2016 (two-person show with Andy Harper)

accumulative something, 2012 (two-person show with Sharon Louden)

Breeder, 2012 (group show with Sarah Bridgland, Pius Fox, Saad Qureshi, Peter Matthews and Katherine Murphy)

Here and again, 2010 (group show with Sarah Bridgland, Katherine Murphy and Susan Stockwell)

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