Catherine Telford Keogh
Catherine Telford Keogh is an Assistant Professor in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design. She is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture whose work is concerned with the fantasies and promises embedded in objects that breakdown through an amalgam of material relations and biological processes.
Catherine Telford Keogh is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design. She is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture whose work is concerned with the fantasies and promises embedded in objects that breakdown through an amalgam of material relations and biological processes. Drawing on fields such as biology, earth science, feminist theory and science fiction, she uses open-ended processes that involve decomposition, scent, chemicals, and metabolism, to transform commodity objects that circulate through deferred possibility.
Telford Keogh received an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art and an MAR in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Yale University. Selected solo exhibitions include Shelf Life at Helena Anrather (New York) Circuit Trouble at Erin Stump Projects (Toronto); Nervous System at Helena Anrather (New York City); Dental Dam at University of Waterloo Art Gallery (Waterloo, ON); and FLAT FOOD, Roberta Pelan (Toronto). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Galeria Fidelidade Arte, Lisbon; Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris; Bronx Museum, New York; Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Thkio Ppalies, Cyprus; and Interstate, New York among others.
While at GIDEST, Catherine’s project will examine the geologic and material processes that enfold human and other-than-human bodies in deep time and shape the conditions of contemporary life. Her material, lab, and field research will consider the ways in which humans and geologic life are knotted together foregrounding what Kathryn Yusoff describes as the “remineralization of the human,” which embeds corporeality in a deep web of sociopolitical material relations. The mixture of organisms unearthed to become oil, design materials, and products permeate everyday life. These objects of the Anthropocene are inevitably enveloped back into the earth, situating humans, differentially, in geologic time.
Catherine’s project will consider how embodied intimacies with deep pasts might summon alternative geologic futures. She will collaborate with geologists to examine disgorged mounds of compacted waste at Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, fossils embedded in the city's infrastructure and fossiliferous limestone in the Hudson Valley. This research will inform a series of sculptures made from repurposed stone products and glass, including mold-blown stackable Rubbermaid™ containers that house amalgam of found materials. Central to this work are questions of containment and supply that consider imaginations of the planet as a “container of infinite resources” along with the modernist desire to create environments that arrest time and decay.
Headshot credit: Sarah Bodri